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GEORGE MAGDONALI) 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

©^Hp. Gup^rig^t l)n. 

Shelf 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 
HOPE OF THE GOSPEL 



GEORGE MAC DONALD 

AUTHOR OF 

UNSPOKEN SERMONS ; HAMLET, A STUDY WITH THE TEXT 

ROBERT FALCONER, THE FLIGHT OF THE SHADOW. ETC. 




NEW YORK ^Vi-^^> 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 
1892 



The Library 

OF Congress 



WASHINGTOl:^ 



«3 



e^ ''^ 3^ 



Copyright, 1892, 
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY. 



Printed at the 
Appleton Press, U. S. A, 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

SALVATION FROM SIN i 

THE REMISSION OF SINS 23 

JESUS IN THE WORLD 41 

JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN 62 

THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 80 

SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY 99 

GOD'S FAMILY 117 

THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE 140 

THE YOKE OF JESUS 153 

THE SALT AND THE LIGHT OF THE WORLD ..173 

THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT 189 

THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE 204 



SALVATION FROM SIN. 

— and thou shalt call his name Jesus; for he shall save his 
people from their sins. — Matthew i. 21. 

I WOULD help some to understand what Jesus 
came from the home of our Father to be to us and 
do for us. Everything in the world is more or less 
misunderstood at first : we have to learn what it is, 
and come at length to see that it must be so, that 
it could not be otherwise. Then we know it ; and 
we never know a thing really until we know it 
thus. 

I presume there is scarce a human being who, 
resolved to speak openly, would not confess to hav- 
ing something that plagued him, something from 
which he would gladly be free, something rendering 
it impossible for him, at the moment, to regard life 
as an altogether good thing. Most men, I presume, 
imagine that, free of such and such things antag- 



2 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

onlstic, life would be an unmlngled satisfaction, 
worthy of being prolonged indefinitely. The causes 
of their discomfort are of all kinds, and the degrees 
of it reach from simple uneasiness to a misery such 
as makes annihilation the highest hope of the suf- 
ferer who can persuade himself of its possibility. 
Perhaps the greater part of the energy of this 
world's life goes forth in the endeavor to rid itself 
of discomfort. Some, to escape it, leave their nat- 
ural surroundings behind them, and with strong and 
continuous effort keep rising in the social scale, to 
discover at every new ascent fresh trouble, as they 
think, awaiting them, whereas in truth they have 
brought the trouble with them. Others, making 
haste to be rich, are slow to find out that the pov- 
erty of their souls, none the less that their purses 
are filling, will yet keep them unhappy. Some 
court endless change, nor know that on themselves 
the change must pass that will set them free. 
Others expand their souls with knowledge, only to 
find that content will not dwell in the great house 
they have built. To number the varieties of hu- 
man endeavor to escape discomfort would be to 
enumerate all the modes of such life as does not 
know how to live. All seek the thing whose defect 



SALVATION FROM SIN, 3 

appears the cause of their misery, and is but the 
variable occasion of it, the cause of the shape it 
takes, not of the misery itself; for, when one 
apparent cause is removed, another at once suc- 
ceeds. The real cause of his trouble is a some- 
thing the man has not perhaps recognized as even 
existent; in any case, he is not yet acquainted 
with its true nature. 

However absurd the statement may appear to 
one who has not yet discovered the fact for him- 
self, the cause of every man's discomfort is evil, 
moral evil — first of all, evil in himself, his own sin, 
his own wrongness, his own unrightness ; and then, 
evil in those he loves : with this latter I have not 
now to deal ; the only way to get rid of it is for 
the man to get rid of his own sin. No special sin 
may be recognizable as having caused this or that 
special physical discomfort — which may indeed 
have originated with some ancestor; but evil in 
ourselves is the cause of its continuance, the 
source of its necessity, and the preventive of that 
patience which would soon take from it, or at 
least blunt its sting. The evil is essentially un- 
necessary, and passes with the attainment of the 
object for which it is permitted — namely, the de- 



4 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

velopment of pure will in man ; the suffering also 
is essentially unnecessary, but while the evil lasts 
the suffering, whether consequent or merely con- 
comitant, is absolutely necessary. Foolish is the 
man, and there are many such men, who would 
rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting 
the world right, by waging war on the evils around 
him, while he neglects that integral part of the 
world where lies his business, his first business — 
namely, his own character and conduct. Were it 
possible — an absurd supposition — that the world 
should thus be righted from the outside, it would 
yet be impossible for the man who had contrib- 
uted to the work, remaining what he was, ever 
to enjoy the perfection of the result; himself not 
in tune with the organ he had tuned, he must 
imagine it still a distracted, jarring instrument. 
The philanthropist who regards the wrong as in 
the race, forgetting that the race is made up of 
conscious and wrong individuals, forgets also that 
wrong is always generated in and done by an in- 
dividual; that the wrongness exists in the indi- 
vidual, and by him is passed over, as tendency, to 
the race; and that no evil can be cured in the 
race, except by its being cured in its individuals : 



SALVATION FROM SIN. 5 

tendency is not absolute evil; it is there that it 
may be resisted, not yielded to. There is no way 
of making three men right but by making right 
each one of the three ; but a cure in one man who 
repents and turns is a beginning of the cure of the 
whole human race. 

Even if a man's suffering be a far inheritance, 
for the curing of which by faith and obedience this 
life would not be sufficiently long, faith and obedi- 
ence will yet render it endurable to the man, and 
overflow in help to his fellow-sufferers. The 
groaning body, wrapped in the garment of hope, 
will, with outstretched neck, look for its redemp- 
tion, and endure. 

The one cure for any organism is to be set right 
— to have all its parts brought into harmony with 
each other; the one comfort is to know this cure 
in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return 
of the organism to its true self is its only possible 
ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be 
set right, put in health ; and the health at the root 
of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from 
wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when 
there is no wrong in him. The wrong, the evil is 
in him ; he must be set free from it. I do not 



6 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

mean set free from the sins he has done : that will 
follow ; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable 
of doing ; the sins in his being which spoil his nat- 
ure — the wrongness in him — the evil he consents 
to ; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he 
does. 

To save a m&n from his sins is to say to him, in 
sense perfect and eternal, " Rise up and walk. Be 
at liberty in thy essential being. Be free as the 
Son of God is free," To do this for us, Jesus was 
born, and remains born to all the ages. When 
misery drives a man to call out to the source of his 
life, — and I take the increasing outcry against ex- 
istence as a sign of the growth of the race toward 
a sense of the need of regeneration — the answer, 
I think, will come in a quickening of his conscience. 
This earnest of the promised deliverance may not, 
in all probability will not, be what the man desires ; 
he will want only to be rid of his suffering ; but 
that he cannot have, save in being delivered from 
its essential root, a thing infinitely worse than any 
suffering it can produce. If he will not have that 
deliverance, he must keep his suffering. Through 
chastisement he will take at last the only way that 
leads into the liberty of that which is and must be. 



SALVATION FROM SIN. 7 

There can be no deliverance but to come out of 
his evil dream into the glory of God. 

It is true that Jesus came, in delivering us from 
our sins, to deliver us also from the painful conse- 
quences of our sins. But these consequences exist 
by the one law of the universe, the true will of 
the Perfect. That broken, that disobeyed by the 
creature, disorganization renders suffering inevit- 
able ; it is the natural consequence of the unnatural 
— and, in the perfection of God's creation, the re- 
sult is curative of the cause; the pain at least 
tends to the healing of the breach. The Lord 
never came to deliver men from the consequences 
of their sins while yet those sins remained : that 
would be to cast out of window the medicine of 
cure while yet the man lay sick; to go dead 
against the very laws of being. Yet men, loving 
their sins, and feeling nothing of their dread hate- 
fulness, have, consistently with their low condition, 
constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to 
mean that he came to save them from the punish- 
ment of their sins. The idea — the miserable fancy, 
rather — has terribly corrupted the preaching of the 
gospel. The message of the good news has not 
been truly delivered. Unable to believe in the 



8 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

forgiveness of their Father in heaven, imagining 
him not at liberty to forgive or incapable of forgiv- 
ing forthright; not really believing him God our 
Saviour, but a God bound, either in his own nature 
or by a law above him and compulsory upon him, 
to exact some recompense or satisfaction for sin, a 
multitude of teaching men have taught their fel- 
lows that Jesus came to bear our punishment and 
save us from hell. They have represented a result 
as the object of his mission — the said result nowise 
to be desired by true man save as consequent on 
the gain of his object. The mission of Jesus was 
from the same source and with the same object as 
the punishment of our sins. He came to work 
along with our punishment. He came to side with 
it, and set us free from our sins. No man is safe 
from hell until he is free from his sins ; but a man 
to whom his sins, that is, the evil things in him, are 
a burden, while he may indeed sometimes feel as 
if he were in hell, will soon have forgotten that 
ever he had any other hell to think of than that of 
his sinful condition. For to him his sins are hell ; 
he would go to the other hell to be free of them ; 
free of them, hell itself would be endurable to him. 
For hell is God's and not the devil's. Hell is on 



SAL VA TIOJV FROM SIN. g 

the side of God and man, to free the child of God 
from the corruption of death. Not one soul will 
ever be redeemed from hell but by being saved 
from his sins, from the evil in him. If hell be 
needful to save him, hell will blaze, and the worm 
will writhe and bite, until he takes refuge in the 
will of the Father. *' Salvation from hell " is sal- 
vation as conceived by such to whom hell and not 
evil is the terror. But if even for dread of hell a 
poor soul seek the Father, he will be heard of him 
in his terror, and, taught of him to seek the im- 
measurably greater gift, will in the greater receive 
the less. 

There is another important misapprehension of 
the words of the messengers of the good tidings — 
that they threaten us with punishment because of 
the sins we have committed, whereas their message 
is of forgiveness, not of vengeance ; of deliverance, 
not of evil to come. Not for anything he has com- 
mitted do they threaten a man with the outer dark- 
ness. Not for any or all of his sins that are past 
shall a man be condemned ; not for the worst of 
them needs he dread remaining unforgiven. The 
sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is 
the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live sins 



lO THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

— those pervading his thoughts and ruling his con- 
duct ; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give 
up; the sins he is called to abandon, and clings 
to ; the same sins which are the cause of his 
misery, though he may not know it — these are 
they for which he is even now condemned. It is 
true the memory of the wrongs we have done is, 
or will become, very bitter ; but not for those is 
condemnation ; and if that in our character which 
made them possible were abolished, remorse would 
lose its worst bitterness in the hope of future 
amends. ** This is the condemnation, that light is 
come into the world, and men loved darkness 
rather than light, because their deeds were evil." 

It is the indwelling badness, ready to produce 
bad actions, that we need to be delivered from. 
Against this badness if a man will not strive, he is 
left to commit evil and reap the consequences. 
To be saved from these consequences would be 
no deliverance; it would be an immediate, ever 
deepening damnation. It is the evil in our being 
— no essential part of it, thank God! — the miser- 
able fact that the very child of God does not care 
for his Father and will not obey him, causing us 
to desire wrongly, act wrongly, or, where we try 



SAL VA TION FROM SIN. 1 1 

not to act wrongly, yet making it impossible for us 
not to feel wrongly — this is what he came to de- 
liver us from; — not the things we have done, but 
the possibility of doing such things any more. 
With the departure of this possibility, and with the 
hope of confession hereafter to those we have 
wronged, will depart also the power over us of the 
evil things we have done, and so we shall be saved 
from them also. The bad that lives in us, our evil 
judgments, our unjust desires, our hate and pride 
and envy and greed and self-satisfaction — these 
are the souls of our sins, our live sins, more terrible 
than the bodies of our sins, namely, the deeds we 
do, inasmuch as they not only produce these loath- 
some things, but make us loathsome as they. Our 
wrong deeds are our dead works ; our evil thoughts 
are our live sins. These, the essential opposites of 
faith and love, the sins that dwell and work in us, 
are the sins from which Jesus came to deliver us. 
When we turn against them and refuse to obey 
them, they rise in fierce insistence, but the same 
moment begin to die. We are then on the Lord's 
side, as he has always been on ours, and he begins 
to deliver us from them. 

Anything in you which, in your own child, 



12 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

would make you feel him not so pleasant as you 
would have him, is something wrong. This may 
mean much to one, little or nothing to another. 
Things in a child which to one parent would not 
seem worth minding would fill another with horror. 
After his moral development, where the one parent 
would smile the other would look aghast, perceiv- 
ing both the present evil and the serpent-brood to 
follow. But as the love of him who is love tran- 
scends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, 
so must he desire in his child infinitely more than 
the most jealous love of the best mother can desire 
in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, 
all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or 
thought, all gauging and micasuring of his own 
with a different rod from that he would apply to 
another's. He will have no curling of the lip ; no 
indifference in him to the man whose service in 
any form he uses ; no desire to excel another, no 
contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not 
have him receive the smallest service without grati- 
tude ; would not hear from him a tone to jar the 
heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the 
ache ever so transient. From such, as from all 
other sins, Jesus was born to deliver us; not, 



SAL VA TION FROM SIN. 1 3 

primarily, or by itself, from the punishment of any 
of them. When all are gone, the holy punishment 
will have departed also. He came to make us good, 
and therein blessed children. 

One master-sin is at the root of all the rest. It 
is no individual action, or anything that comes of 
mood, or passion ; it is the non-recognition by the 
man, and consequent inactivity in him, of the high- 
est of all relations, that relation which is the root 
and first essential condition of every other true 
relation of or in the human soul. It is the absence 
in the man of harmony with the being whose 
thought is the man's existence, whose word is the 
man's power of thought. It is true that, being 
thus his offspring, God, as St. Paul affirms, cannot 
be far from any one of us : were we not in closest 
contact of creating and created, we could not exist ; 
as we have in us no power to be, so have we none 
to continue being; but there is a closer contact 
still, as absolutely necessary to our well-being and 
highest existence as the other to our being at all, 
to the mere capacity of faring well or ill. For the 
highest creation of God in man is his will, and until 
the highest in man meets the highest in God, their 
true relation is not yet a spiritual fact. The flower 



14 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

lies in the root, but the root is not the flower. The 
relation exists, but while one of the parties neither 
knows, loves, nor acts upon it, the relation is, as it 
were, yet unborn. The highest in man is neither 
his intellect nor his imagination nor his reason ; all 
are inferior to his will, and indeed, in a grand way, 
dependent upon it : his will must meet God's — a 
will distinct from God's, else were no harmony 
possible between them. Not the less, therefore, 
but the more, is all God's. For God creates in the 
man the power to will his will. It may cost God 
a suffering man can never know, to bring the man 
to the point at which he will will his will; but 
when he is brought to that point, and declares for 
the truth, that is, for the will of God, he becomes 
one with God, and the end of God in the man's 
creation, the end for which Jesus was born and died, 
is gained. The man is saved from his sins, and 
the universe flowers yet again in his redemption. 

But I would not be supposed, from what I have 
said, to imagine the Lord without sympathy for 
the sorrows and pains which reveal what sin is, and 
by means of which he would make men sick of sin. 
With everything human he sympathizes. Evil is 
not human; it is the defect and opposite of the 



SALVATION FROM SIN, 1 5 

human ; but the suffering that follows it is human, 
belonging of necessity to the human that has 
sinned : while it is by cause of sin, suffering is for 
the sinner, that he may be delivered from his sin. 
Jesus is in himself aware of every human pain. He 
feels it also. In him, too, it is pain. With the 
energy of tenderest love he wills his brothers and 
sisters free, that he may fill them to overflowing 
with that essential thing, joy. For that they were 
indeed created. But the moment they exist, truth 
becomes the first thing, not happiness; and. he 
must make them true. Were it possible, however, 
for pain to continue after evil was gone, he would 
never rest while one ache was yet in the world. 
Perfect in sympathy, he feels in himself, I say, the 
tortured presence of every nerve that lacks its 
repose. The man may recognize the evil in him 
only as pain ; he may know little and care nothing 
about his sins ; yet is the Lord sorry for his pain. 
He cries aloud, *' Come unto me, all ye that labor 
and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." 
He does not say, ** Come unto me, all ye that feel 
the burden of your sins " ; he opens his arms to 
all weary enough to come to him in the poorest 
hope of rest. Right gladly would he free them 



1 6 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

from their misery — but he knows only one way : 
he w411 teach them to be like himself, meek and 
lowly, bearing with gladness the yoke of his 
Father's will. This is the one, the only right, the 
only possible way of freeing them from their sins, 
the cause of their unrest. With them the weari- 
ness comes first ; with him the sins : there is but 
one cure for both — the will of the Father. That 
which is his joy will be their deliverance! He 
might, indeed, it may be, take from them the 
human, send them down to some lower stage of 
being, and so free them from suffering — but that 
must be either a descent toward annihilation, or a 
fresh beginning to grow up again toward the region 
of suffering they have left ; for that which is not 
growing must at length die out of creation. The 
disobedient and selfish would fain in the hell of 
their hearts possess the liberty and gladness that 
belong to purity and love, but they cannot have 
them; they are weary and heavy-laden, both with 
what they are, and because of what they were 
made for but are not. The Lord knows what they 
need ; they know only what they want. They 
want ease ; he knows they need purity. Their 
very existence is an evil, of which, but for his re- 



SALVATION FROM SIN. I J 

solve to purify them, their Maker must rid his uni- 
verse. How can he keep in his sight a foul pres- 
ence ? Must the Creator send forth his virtue to 
hold alive a thing that will be evil — a thing that 
ought not to be, that has no claim but to cease? 
The Lord himself would not live save with an ex- 
istence absolutely good. 

It may be my reader will desire me to say how 
the Lord will deliver him from his sins. That is 
like the lawyer's "'Who is my neighbor ? " The 
spirit of such a mode of receiving the offer of the 
Lord's deliverance is the root of all the horrors of 
a corrupt theology, so acceptable to those who love 
weak and beggarly hornbooks of religion. Such 
questions spring from the passion for the fruit of 
the tree of knowledge, not the fruit of the tree of 
life. Men would understand : they do not care 
to obey; — understand where it is impossible they 
should understand save by obeying. They would 
search into the w^ork of the Lord instead of doing 
their part in it — thus making it impossible both for 
the Lord to go on with his work, and for them- 
selves to become capable of seeing and understand- 
ing what he does. Instead of immediately obey- 
ing the Lord of life, the one condition upon which 



1 8 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

he can help them, and in itself the beginning of 
their deliverance, they set themselves to question 
their unenlightened intellects as to his plans for 
their deliverance — and not merely how he means 
to effect it, but how he can be able to effect it. 
They would bind their Samson until they have 
scanned his limbs and thews. Incapable of under- 
standing the first motions of freedom in themselves, 
they proceed to interpret the riches of his divine 
soul in terms of their own beggarly notions, to 
paraphrase his glorious verse into their own paltry 
commercial prose , and then, in the growing pre- 
sumption of imagined success, to insist upon their 
neighbors' acceptance of their distorted shadows of 
" the plan of salvation" as the truth of him in whom 
is no darkness, and the one condition of their ac- 
ceptance with him. They delay setting their foot 
on the stair which alone can lead them to the 
house of wisdom, until they shall have determined 
the material and mode of its construction. For the 
sake of knowing, they postpone that which alone 
can enable them to know, and substitute for the 
true understanding which lies beyond, a false per- 
suasion that they already understand. They will 
not accept, that is, act upon, their highest privilege. 



SALVATION FROM SIN, 1 9 

that of obeying the Son of God. It is on them 
that do his will that the day dawns ; to them the 
day-star arises in their hearts. Obedience is the 
soul of knowledge. 

By obedience, I intend no kind of obedience to 
man, or submission to authority claimed by man or 
community of men. I mean obedience to the will 
of the Father, however revealed in our conscience. 

God forbid I should seem to despise understand- 
ing. The New Testament is full of urgings to un- 
derstand. Our whole life, to be life at all, must be 
a growth in understanding. What I cry out upon 
is the misunderstanding that comes of man's en- 
deavor to understand while not obeying. Upon 
obedience our energy must be spent ; understand- 
ing will follow. Not anxious to know our duty, or 
knowing it and not doing it, how shall we under- 
stand that which only a true heart and a clean soul 
can ever understand ? The power in us that would 
understand were it free, lies in the bonds of imper- 
fection and impurity, and is therefore incapable of 
judging the divine. It cannot see the truth. If it 
could see it, it would not know it, and would not 
have it. Until a man begins to obey, the light 
that is in him is darkness. 



20 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

Any honest soul may understand this much, 
however — for it is a thing we may of ourselves 
judge to be right — that the Lord cannot save a 
man from his sins while he holds to his sins. And 
omnipotence that could do and not do the same 
thing at the same moment, were an idea too ab- 
surd for mockery ; an omnipotence that could at 
once make a man a free man, and leave him a self- 
degraded slave — make him the very likeness of 
God, and good only because he could not help 
being good, would be an idea of the same charac- 
ter — equally absurd, equally self- contradictory. 

But the Lord is not unreasonable ; he requires 
no high motives where such could not yet exist. 
He does not say, "You must be sorry for your 
sins, or you need not come to me " : to be sorry 
for his sins a man must love God and man, and 
love is the very thing that has to be developed in 
him. It is but common sense that a man, longing 
to be freed from suffering, or made able to bear it, 
should betake himself to the Power by whom he 
is. Equally is it common sense that, if a man 
would be delivered from the evil in him, he must 
himself begin to cast it out, himself begin to dis- 
obey it, and work righteousness. As much as 



SAL VA TION FROM SIN. 2 1 

either is it common sense that a man should look 
for and expect the help of his Father in the en- 
deavor. Alone, he might labor to all eternity and 
not succeed. He who has not made himself can- 
not set himself right without him who made him. 
But his Maker is in him, and is his strength. 
The man, however, who, instead of doing what he 
is told, broods speculating on the metaphysics of 
him who calls him to his work, stands leaning his 
back against the door by which the Lord would 
enter to help him. The moment he sets about 
putting straight the thing that is crooked — I mean 
doing right where he has been doing wrong — he 
withdraws from the entrance, gives way for the 
Master to come in. He cannot make himself pure, 
but he can leave that which is impure; he can 
spread out the '' defiled, discolored web " of his life 
before the bleaching sun of righteousness ; he can- 
not save himself, but he can let th'e Lord save him. 
The struggle of his weakness is as essential to the 
coming victory as the strength of him who resisted 
unto death, striving against sin. 

The sum of the whole matter is this : the Son 
has come from the Father to set the children free 
from their sins ; the children must hear and obey 



22 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

him, that he may send forth judgment unto 
victory. 

Son of our Father, help us to do what thou say- 
est, and so with thee die unto sin, that we may rise 
to the sonship for which we were created. Help 
us to repent even to the sending away of our sins. 



THE REMISSION OF SINS. 

John did baptize in the wilderness, and preach the baptism of 
repentance for the remission of sins. — Mark i. 4. 

God and man must combine for salvation from 
sin, and the same word, here and elsewhere trans- 
lated remission^ seems to be employed in the New 
Testament for the share of either in the great 
deliverance. 

But first let me say something concerning the 
word here and everywhere translated repentance, 
I would not even suggest a mistranslation ; but 
the idea intended by the word has been so mis- 
understood and therefore mistaught, that it requires 
some consideration of the word itself to get at a 
right recognition of the moral fact it represents. 

The Greek word, then, of which the word repent- 
ance is the accepted synonym and fundamentally 
the accurate rendering, is made up of two words, 



24 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

the conjoint meaning of which is, a change of tnind 
or thought. There is in it no intent of or hint at 
sorrow or shames or any other of the mental con- 
ditions that, not unfrequently accompanying re- 
pentance, have been taken for essential parts of it, 
sometimes for its very essence. Here, the last of 
the prophets, or the evangehst who records his 
doings, qualifies the word, as if he held it insuffi- 
cient in itself to convey the Baptist's meaning, with 
the three words that follow it — el<; d^teaiv dfiaprLibv : 
— KTjpvoGOJV BdnTiGfjia fiEravoLag elg acpeoLV dfiapricbv — 
** preaching a baptism of repentance — zmto a send- 
ing away of sins' ^ I do not say the phrase dcpEoig 
dfiapTiCjv never means forgiveness, one form at least 
of God's sending away of sins ; neither do I say 
that the taking of the phrase to mean repentance 
for the remission of sins, namely, repentance in 
order to obtain the pardon of God, involves any 
inconsistency ; but I say that the word iiq is rather 
tmto than for; that the word dcpEaig, translated 
re7mssion, means, fundamentally, a sending away, 
a dismissal; and that the writer seems to use the 
added phrase to make certain what he means by 
repentance; a repentance, namely, that reaches to 
the sending away, or abjurement of sins. I do not 



THE REMISSION OF SINS. 25 

think a change of mind unto the remission or par- 
don of sin would be nearly so logical a phrase as 
a change of mind unto the dismission of simting. 
The revised version refuses the word for and 
chooses unto, though it retains remission, which 
word, now, conveys no meaning except the for- 
giveness of God. I think that here the same word 
is used for man's dismission of his sins, as is else- 
where used for God's dismission or remission of 
them. In both uses, it is a sending away of sins, 
with the difference of meaning that comes from 
the differing sources of the action. Both God and 
man send away sins, but in the one case God sends 
away the sins of the man, and in the other the man 
sends away his own sins. I do not enter into the 
question whether God's d(f)eGig may or may not 
mean as well the sending of his sins out of a man, 
as the pardon of them ; whether it may not some- 
times mean dismission, and sometimes remission: I 
am sure the one deed cannot be separated from 
the other. 

That the phrase here intends repentance unto 
the ceasing from sin, the giving up of what is 
wrong, I will try to show at least probable. 

In the first place, the user of the phrase either 



26 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

defines the change of mind he means as one that 
has for its object the pardon of God, or as one that 
reaches to a new life : the latter seems to me the 
more natural interpretation by far. The kind and 
scope of the repentance or change, and not any end 
to be gained by it, appears intended. The change 
must be one of will and conduct — a radical change 
of life on the part of the man : he must repent — 
that is, change his mind — not to a different opinion, 
not even to a mere betterment of his conduct — not 
to anything less than a sending away of his sins. 
This interpretation of the preaching of the Baptist 
seems to me, I repeat, the more direct, the fuller 
of meaning, the more logical. 

Next, in St. Matthew's gospel, the Baptist's 
buttressing argument, or imminent motive for the 
change he is pressing upon the people is, that the 
kingdom of heaven is at hand : " Because the King 
of heaven is coming, you must give up your sin- 
ning." The same argument for immediate action 
lies in his quotation from Isaiah, — ^' Prepare ye the 
way of the Lord ; make straight in the desert a 
highway for our God." The only true, the only 
possible preparation for the coming Lord, is to 
cease from doing evil, and begin to do well — to 



THE REMISSION OF SINS. 27 

send away sin. They must cleanse, not the streets 
of their cities, not their houses or their garments or 
even their persons, but their hearts and their doings. 
It is true the Baptist did not see that the kingdom 
coming was not of this world, but of the higher 
world in the hearts of men ; it is true that his faith 
failed him in his imprisonment, because he heard 
of no martial movement on the part of the Lord, 
no assertion of his sovereignty, no convincing show 
of his power; but he did see plainly that right- 
eousness was essential to the kingdom of heaven. 
That he did not yet perceive that righteousness is 
the kingdom of heaven ; that he did not see that 
the Lord was already initiating his kingdom by 
sending away sin out of the hearts of his people, 
is not wonderful. The Lord's answer to his fore- 
runner's message of doubt was to send his messen- 
ger back an eye-witness of what he was doing, so 
to wake or clarify in him the perception that his 
kingdom was not of this world — that he dealt with 
other means to another end than John had yet 
recognized as his mission or object ; for obedient 
love in the heart of the poorest he healed or per- 
suaded, was his kingdom come. 

Again, observe that, when the Pharisees came to 



28 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

John, he said to them, '' Bring forth therefore fruits 
meet for repentance " : is not this the same as, 
*' Repent unto the sending away of your sins " ? 

Note also, that, when the multitudes came to the 
prophet, and all, with the classes most obnoxious 
to the rest, the publicans and the soldiers, asked 
what he would have them do — thus plainly recog- 
nizing that something was required of them — his 
instruction was throughout in the same direction : 
they must send away their sins; and each must 
begin with the fault that lay next him. The king- 
dom of heaven was at hand : they must prepare 
the way of the Lord by beginning to do as must 
be done in his kingdom. 

They could not rid themselves of their sins, but 
they could set about sending them away; they 
could quarrel with them, and proceed to turn them 
out of the house : the Lord was on his way to do 
his part in their final banishment. Those who had 
repented to the sending away of their sins, he 
would baptize with a holy power to send them 
away indeed. The operant will to get rid of them 
would be baptized with a fire that should burn 
them up. When a man breaks with his sins, 
then the wind of the Lord's fan will blow them 



THE REMISSION OF SINS, 29 

away, the fire of the Lord's heart will consume 
them. 

I think, then, that the part of the repentant man, 
and not the part of God, in the sending away of 
sins, is intended here. It is the man's one prep- 
aration for receiving the power to overcome them, 
the baptism of fire. 

Not seldom, what comes in the name of the 
gospel of Jesus Christ must seem, even to one not 
far from the kingdom of heaven, no good news at 
all. It does not draw him ; it wakes in him not a 
single hope. He has no desire after what it offers 
him as redemption. The God it gives him news 
of is not one to whom he would draw nearer. But 
when such a man comes to see that the very God 
must be his life, the heart of his consciousness; 
when he perceives that, rousing himself to put 
from him what is evil, and do the duty that lies at 
his door, he may fearlessly claim the help of him 
who '"loved him Into being," then his will imme- 
diately sides with his conscience ; he begins to try 
to be; and — first thing toward being — to rid him- 
self of what is antagonistic to all being, namely, 
wrong. Multitudes will not even approach the 
appalling task, the labor and pain of being. God 



30 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

is doing his part, is undergoing the mighty toil of 
an age-long creation, endowing men with power to 
be; but few. as yet are those who take up their 
part, who respond to the call of God, who will to 
be, who put forth a divine effort after real exist- 
ence. To the many the spirit of the prophet cries, 
" Turn ye, and change your way ! The kingdom 
of heaven is near you. Let your King possess his 
own. Let God throne himself in you, that his 
liberty be your life, and you free men. That he 
may enter, clear the house for him. Send away 
the bad things out of it. Depart from evil, and do 
good. The duty that lieth at thy door, do it, be 
it great or small." 

For indeed in this region there is no great or 
small. " Be content with your wages," said the 
Baptist to the soldiers. To many people now, the 
word would be, " Rule your temper " ; or " Be 
courteous to all"; or, "Let each hold the other 
better than himself " ; or, '' Be just to your neigh- 
bor that you may love him." To make straight in 
the desert a highway for our God, we must bestir 
ourselves in the very spot of the desert on which 
we stand ; we must cast far from us our evil thing 
that blocks the way of his chariot-wheels. If we 



THE REMISSION OF SINS. 31 

do not, never will those wheels roll through our 
streets; never will our desert blossom with his 
roses. 

The message of John to his countrymen was 
then, and is yet, the one message to the world : 
" Send away your sins, for the kingdom of heaven 
is near." Some of us — I cannot say all, for I do 
not know — who have already repented, who have 
long ago begun to send away our sins, need fresh 
repentance every day — how many times a day, 
God only knows. We are so ready to get upon 
some path that seems to run parallel with the nar- 
row way, and then take no note of its divergence ! 
What is there for us when we discover that we 
are out of the way but to bethink ourselves and 
turn? By those '' who need no repentance," the 
Lord may have meant such as had repented per- 
fectly, had sent away all their sins, and were now 
with him in his Father's house ; also such as have 
never sinned, and such as no longer turn aside for 
any temptation. 

We shall now, perhaps, be able to understand 
the relation of the Lord himself to the baptism of 
John. 

He came to John to be baptized; and most 



32 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

would say John's baptism was of repentance for 
the remission or pardon of sins. But the Lord 
could not be baptized for the remission of sins, for 
he had never done a selfish, an untrue, or an un- 
fair thing. He had never wronged his Father, any 
more than ever his Father had wronged him. 
Happy, happy Son and Father, who had never 
either done the other wrong, in thought, word, or 
deed ! As little had he wronged brother^or sister. 
He needed no forgiveness ; there was nothing to 
forgive. No more could he be baptized for re- 
pentance : in him repentance would have been to 
turn to evil ! Where, then, was the propriety of 
his coming to be baptized by John, and insisting 
on being by him baptized? It must lie elsewhere. 
If we take the words of John to mean '' the 
baptism of repentance unto the sending away of 
sins " ; and if we bear in mind that in his case re- 
pentance could not be, inasmuch as what repent- 
ance is necessary to bring about in man was 
already existent in Jesus ; then, altering the words 
to fit the case, and saying, " the baptism of willed 
devotion to the sending away of sin," we shall see 
at once how the baptism of Jesus was a thing right 
and fit. 



THE REMISSION OF SINS. 33 

That he had no sin to repent of, was not because 
he was so constituted that he could not sin if he 
would ; it was because, of his own will and judg- 
ment, he sent sin away from him — sent it from him 
with the full choice and energy of his nature. God 
knows good and evil, and, blessed be his name, 
chooses good. Never will his righteous anger 
make him unfair to us, make him forget that we 
are dust. Like him, his Son also chose good, and 
in that choice resisted all temptation to help his 
fellows otherwise than as their and his Father 
would. ' Instead of crushing the power of evil by 
divine force ; instead of compelling justice and de- 
stroying the wicked ; instead of making peace on 
the earth by the rule of a perfect prince ; instead 
of gathering the children of Jerusalem under his 
wings whether they would or not, and saving them 
from the horrors that anguished his prophetic soul 
— he let evil work its will while it lived ; he con- 
tented himself with the slow unencouraging ways 
of help essential ; making men good ; casting out, 
not merely controlling Satan; carrying to their 
perfect issue on earth the old primeval principles 
because of which the Father honored him : " Thou 

hast loved righteousness and hated iniquity ; there- 
3 



34 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

fore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee with 
the oil of gladness above thy fellows." To love 
righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it ; 
and to win for righteousness the true victory, he, 
as well as his brethren, had to send away evil. 
Throughout his life on earth, he resisted every im- 
pulse to work more rapidly for a lower good, — 
strong, perhaps, when he saw old age and innocence 
and righteousness trodden under foot. What but 
this gives any worth of reality to the temptation 
in the wilderness, to the devil's departing from him 
for a season, to his coming again to experience a 
Hke failure ? Ever and ever, in the whole attitude 
of his being, in his heart always lifted up, in his 
unfaiHng readiness to pull with the Father's yoke, 
he was repelling, driving away sin — away from 
himself, and, as Lord of men, and their savior, 
away from others also, bringing them to abjure it 
like himself. No man, least of all any lord of 
men, can be good without willing to be good, 
without setting himself against evil, without send- 
ing away sin. Other men have to send it away 
out of them ; the Lord had to send it away 
from before him, that it should not enter into 
him. Therefore is the stand against sin com- 



THE REMISSION OF SINS, 35 

mon to the captain of salvation and the soldiers 
under him. 

What did Jesus come into the world to do? 
The will of God in saving his people from their 
sins — not from the punishment of their sins, that 
blessed aid to repentance, but from their sins 
themselves, the paltry as well as the heinous, the 
venial as well as the loathsome. His whole work 
was and is to send away sin — to banish it from the 
earth, yea, to cast it into the abyss of non-exist- 
ence behind the back of God. His was the holy 
war ; he came carrying it into our world ; he re- 
sisted unto blood ; the soldiers that followed him 
he taught and trained to resist also unto blood, 
striving against sin ; so he became the captain of 
their salvation, and they, freed themselves, fought 
and suffered for others. This was the task to 
which he was baptized; this is yet his enduring 
labor. " This is my blood of the new covenant 
which is shed for many unto the sending away 
of sins." What was the new covenant? '* I will 
make a new covenant with the house of Israel and 
with the house of Judah; not according to the 
covenant which they brake, but this : I will put 
my law in their inward parts, and write it in their 



36 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be my 
people." 

John baptized unto repentance because those to 
whom he was sent had to repent. They must be- 
think themselves, and send away the sin that was 
in them. But had there been a man aware of no 
sin in him, but aware that life would be no life 
were not sin kept out of him, that man would have 
been right in receiving the baptism of John unto 
the continuous dismission of the sin ever wanting 
to enter in at his door. The object of the baptism 
was the sending away of sin; its object was re- 
pentance only where necessary to, only as intro- 
ducing, as resulting in that. He to whom John 
was not sent, he whom he did not call, he who 
needed no repentance, was baptized, for the same 
object, to the same conflict for the same end — the 
banishment of sin from the dominions of his Father 
— and that first by his own sternest repudiation of 
it in himself. Thence came his victory in the 
wilderness : he would have his Father's way, not 
his own. Could he be less fitted to receive the 
baptism of John, that the object of it was no new 
thing w4th him, who had been about it from the 
beginning, yea, from all eternity? We shall be 
about it, I presume, to all eternity. 



THE REMISSION OF SINS. 37 

Such, then, as were baptized by John, were ini- 
tiated into the company of those whose work was 
to send sin out of the world, and first, by sending 
it out of themselves, by having done with it. 
Their earliest endeavor in this direction would, as 
I have said, open the door for that help to enter 
without which a man could never succeed in the 
divinely arduous task — could not, because the 
region in which the work has to be wrought lies 
in the very roots of his own being, where, knowing 
nothing of the secrets of his essential existence, 
he can immediately do nothing, where the Maker 
of him alone is potent, alone is consciously present. 
The change that must pass in him more than 
equals a new creation, inasmuch as it is a higher 
creation. But its necessity is involved in a former 
creation ; and thence we have a right to ask help 
of our Creator, for he requires of us what he has 
created us unable to effect without him. Nay, 
nay! — could we do anything without him, it were 
a thing to leave undone. Blessed fact that he hath 
made us so near him! that the scale of our being 
is so large, that we are completed only by his 
presence in it ! that we are not men without him ! 
that we can be one with our self-existent Creator! 
that we are not cut off from the original Infinite ! 



38 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

that in him we must share infinitude, or be en- 
slaved by the finite! The very patent of our 
royalty is, that not for a moment can we live our 
true life without the eternal life present in and 
with our spirits. Without him at our unknown 
root, we cease to be. True, a dog cannot live 
without the presence of God; but I presume a 
dog may live a good dog-life without knowing the 
presence of his origin : man is dead if he know not 
the Power which is his cause, his deepest selfing 
self; the Presence which is not himself, and is 
nearer to him than himself; which is infinitely 
more himself, more his very being, than he is him- 
self. The being of which we are conscious is not 
our full self; the extent of our consciousness of 
our self is no measure of our self; our conscious- 
ness is infinitely less than we ; while God is more 
necessary even to that poor consciousness of self 
than our self-consciousness is necessary to our 
humanity. Until a man become the power of his 
own existence, become his own God, the sole thing 
necessary to his existing is the will of God; for 
the well-being and perfecting of that existence, the 
sole thing necessary is, that the man should know 
his Maker present in him. All that the children 
want is their Father. 



THE REMISSION OF SINS. 39 

The one true end of all speech concerning holy- 
things is — the persuading of the individual man to 
cease to do evil, to set himself to do well, to look 
to the Lord of his life to be on his side in the new- 
struggle. Supposing the suggestions I have made 
correct, I do not care that my reader should under- 
stand them, except it be to turn against the evil in 
him, and begin to cast it out. If this be not the 
result, it is of no smallest consequence whether 
he agree with my interpretation or not. If he do 
thus repent, it is of equally little consequence ; for, 
setting himself to do the truth, he is on the way 
to know all things. Real knowledge has begun to 
grow possible for him. 

I am not sure what the Lord means in the 
words, '' Thus it becometh us to fulfill all right- 
eousness." Baptism could not be the fulfilling of 
all righteousness ! Perhaps he means, '' We must, 
by a full act of the will, give ourselves altogether 
to righteousness. We must make it the business 
of our lives to send away sin, and do the will of 
the Father. That is my work as much as the 
work of any man who must repent ere he can 
begin. I will not be left out when you call men 
to be pure as our Father is pure." 

To be certain whom he intends by tiSy might 



40 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

perhaps help us to see his meaning. Does he 
intend all of us men ? Does he intend " my 
Father and me " ? Or does he intend '' you and 
me, John " ? If the saying mean what I have sug- 
gested, then the us would apply to all that have 
the knowledge of good and evil. " Every being 
that can, must devote himself to righteousness. 
To be right is no adjunct of completeness; it is 
the ground and foundation of existence." But 
perhaps it was a lesson for John himself, who, 
mighty preacher of righteousness as he was, did 
not yet count it the all of life. I cannot tell. 

Note that when the Lord began his teaching, he 
employed, neither using nor inculcating any rite, 
the sam.e words as John, " Repent, for the king- 
dom of heaven is at hand." 

That kingdom had been at hand all his infancy, 
boyhood, and young manhood : he was in the 
world with his Father in his heart : that was the 
kingdom of heaven. Lonely man on the hillside, 
or boy the cynosure of doctor- eyes, his Father was 
everything to him : '' Wist ye not that I must be 
in my Father's things?" 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 

Son, why hast thou thus dealt with us? behold, thy father and 
I have sought thee sorrowing. And he said unto them, How 
is it that ye sought me? wist ye not that I must be about my 
Father's business? And they understood not the saying which he 
spake unto them. — Luke ii. 48-50. 

Was that his saying? Why did they not 
understand it? Do we understand it? What did 
his saying mean? The Greek is not absolutely 
clear. Whether the Syriac words he used were 
more precise, who in this world can tell ? But had 
we heard his very words, we too, with his father 
and mother, would have failed to understand them. 
Must we fail still ? 

It will show at once where our initial difficulty 
lies, if I give the latter half of the saying as pre- 
sented in the revised English version : its depart- 
ure from the authorized reveals the point of ob- 
scurity: **Wist ye not that I must be in my 



42 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

Father's house?" His parents had his exact 
words, yet did not understand. We have not his 
exact words, and are in doubt as to what the 
Greek translation of them means. 

If the authorized translation be true to the in- 
tent of the Greek, and therefore to that of the 
Syriac, how could his parents, knowing him as 
they did from all that had been spoken before con- 
cerning him, from all they had seen in him, from 
the ponderings in Mary's own heart, and from the 
precious thoughts she and Joseph cherished con- 
cerning him, have failed to understand him when 
he said that wherever he was, he must be about 
his Father's business? On the other hand, sup- 
posing them to know and feel that he must be 
about his Father's business, would that have been 
reason sufficient, in view of the degree of spiritual 
development to which they had attained, for the 
Lord's expecting them not to be anxious about 
him when they had lost him? Thousands on 
thousands who trust God for their friends in things 
spiritual do not trust him for them in regard of 
their mere health or material well-being. His 
parents knew how prophets had always been 
treated in the land ; or, if they did not think in 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 43 

that direction, there were many dangers to which 
a boy Hke him would seem exposed, to rouse an 
anxiety that could be met only by a faith equal to 
saying, ''Whatever has happened to him, death 
itself, it can be no evil to one who is about his 
Father's business"; and such a faith I think the 
Lord could not yet have expected of them. That 
what the world counts misfortune might befall him 
on his Father's business, would have been recog- 
nized by him, I think, as reason for their parental 
anxiety — so long as they had not learned God — 
that he is what he is — the thing the Lord had 
come to teach his Father's men and women. His 
words seem rather to imply that there was no need 
to be anxious about his personal safety. Fear of 
some accident to him seems to have been the cause 
of their trouble; and he did not mean, I think, 
that they ought not to mind if he died doing his 
Father's will, but that he was in no danger as re- 
garded accident or misfortune. This will appear 
more plainly as we proceed. So much for the au- 
thorized version. 

Let us now take the translation given us by the 
Revisers : " Wist ye not that I must be in my 
Father's house?" 



44 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

Are they authorized in translating the Greek 
thus? I know no justification for it, but am not 
learned enough to say they have none. That the 
Syriac has it so is of little weight, seeing it is no 
original Syriac, but re-translation. If he did say 
"my Father's hozise,'" could he have meant the 
temple and his parents not have known what he 
meant? And why should he have taken it for 
granted they would know, or judge that they 
ought to have known, that he was there ? So little 
did the temple suggest itself to them, that either 
it was the last place in which they sought him, or 
they had been there before, and had not found 
him. If he meant that they might have known 
this without being told, why was it that, even 
when he set the thing before them, they did not 
understand him? I do not believe he meant the 
temple ; I do not think he said or meant ** i7z my 
Father's house'' 

What then makes those who give us this trans- 
lation prefer it to the phrase in the authorized ver- 
sion, ''about my Father's business " ? 

One or other of two causes — most likely both 
together : an ecclesiastical fancy, and the mere fact 
that he was found in the temple. A mind eccle- 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 45 

siastical will presume the temple the fittest, there- 
fore most likely place, for the Son of God to be- 
take himself to, but such a mind would not be the 
first to reflect that the temple was a place where 
the Father was worshiped neither in spirit nor in 
truth — a place built by one of the vilest rulers of 
this world, less fit than many another spot for the 
special presence of him of whom the prophet bears 
witness : *' Thus saith the high and lofty One that 
inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy ; I dwell 
in the high and holy place, with him also that is 
of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit 
of the humble, and to revive the heart of the con- 
trite ones." Jesus himself, with the same breath 
in which once he called it his Father's house, called 
it a den of thieves. His expulsion from it of the 
buyers and sellers was the first waft of the fan with 
which he was come to purge his Father's domin- 
ions. Nothing could ever cleanse that house ; his 
fanning rose to a tempest, and swept it out of his 
Father's world. 

For the second possible cause of the change 
from business to temple — the mere fact that he was 
found in the temple can hardly be a reason for his 
expecting his parents to know that he was there ; 



46 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

and if it witnessed to some way of thought or habit 
of his with which they were acquainted, it is, I re- 
peat, difficult to see why the parents should fail to 
perceive what the interpreters have found so easily. 
But the parents looked for a larger meaning in the 
words of such a son — whose meaning at the same 
time was too large for them to find. 

When, according to the Greek, the Lord, on the 
occasion already alluded to, says '' my Father's 
house," he says it plainly ; he uses the word house : 
here he does not. 

Let us see what lies in the Greek to guide us to 
the thought in the mind of the Lord when he thus 
reasoned with the apprehensions of his father and 
mother. The Greek, taken literally, says, '*Wist 

ye not that I must be in the of my 

Father?" The authorized version supplies busi- 
ness; the revised, house. There is no noun in the 
Greek, and the article '' the " is in the plural. To 
translate it as literally as it can be translated, mak- 
ing of it an English sentence, the saying stands, 
^' Wist ye not that I must be in the things of my 
Father?" The plural article implies the English 
things; and- the question is tTien, What things 
does he mean ? The word might mean affairs or 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 47 

business; but why the plural article should be 
contracted to mean house^ I do not know. In a 
great wide sense, no doubt, the word house might 
be used, as I am about to show, but surely not as 
meaning the temple. 

He was arguing for confidence in God on the 
part of his parents, not for a knowledge of his 
whereabout. The same thing that made them 
anxious concerning him prevented them from un- 
derstanding his words — lack, namely, of faith in 
the Father. This, the one thing he came into the 
world to teach men, those words were meant to 
teach his parents. They are spirit and life, involv- 
ing the one principle by which men shall live. 
They hold the same core as his words to his dis- 
ciples in the storm, *' Oh ye of Httle faith!" Let 
us look more closely at them. 

** Why did you look for me ? Did you not 
know that I must be among my Father's things?" 
What are we to understand by " my Father's 
things " ? The translation given in the authorized 
version is, I think, as to the words themselves, a 
thoroughly justifiable one : " I must be about my 
Father's business," or '' my Father's affairs " ; I 
refuse it for no other reason than that it does not 



48 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

fit the logic of the narrative, as does the word 
tilings^ which besides opens to us a door of large 
and joyous prospect. Of course he was about his 
Father's business, and they might know it and yet 
be anxious about him, not having a perfect faith in 
that Father. But, as I have said already, it was 
not anxiety as to what might befall him because of 
doing the will of the Father ; he might well seem 
to them as yet too young for danger from that 
source ; it was but the vague perils of life beyond 
their sight that appalled them ; theirs was just the 
uneasiness that possesses every parent whose child 
is missing ; and if they, like him, had trusted in 
their Father, they would have known what their 
Son now meant when he said that he was in the 
midst of his Father's things — namely, that the very 
things from which they dreaded evil accident were 
his own home- surroundings ; that he was not do- 
ing the Father's business in a foreign country, but 
in the Father's own house. Understood as mean- 
ing the world, or the universe, the phrase, " my 
Father's house," would be a better translation than 
the authorized; understood as meaning the poor, 
miserable, God-forsaken temple — no more the 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 49 

house of God than a dead body Is the house of a 
man — it is immeasurably inferior. 

It seems to me, I say, that the Lord meant to 
remind them, or rather to make them feel, for they 
had not yet learned the fact, that he was never 
away from home, could not be lost, as they had 
thought him ; that he was in his Father's house all 
the time, where no hurt could come to him. " The 
things " about him were the furniture and utensils 
of his home ; he knew them all and how to pse 
them. '' I must be among my Father's belong- 
ings." The world was his home because his 
Father's house. He was not a stranger who did 
not know his way about in it. He was no lost 
child, but with his Father all the time. 

Here we find one main thing wherein the Lord 
differs from us : we are not at home in this great 
universe, our Father's house. We ought to be, 
and one day we shall be, but we are not yet. This 
reveals Jesus more than man, by revealing him 
more man than we. We are not complete men, 
we are not anything near it, and are therefore out 
of harmony, more or less, with everything in the 
house of our birth and habitation. Always strug- 
4 



50 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

gling to make our home in the world, we have not 
yet succeeded. We are not at home in it, because 
we are not at home with the lord of the house, the 
father of the family, not one with our elder brother 
who is his right hand. It is only the son, the 
daughter, that abideth ever in the house. When 
we are true children, if not the world, then the 
universe will be our home, felt and known as such, 
the house we are satisfied with, and would not 
change. Hence, until then, the hard struggle, the 
constant strife we hold with Nature — as we call the 
things of our Father; a strife invaluable for our 
development, at the same time manifesting us not 
yet men enough to be lords of the house built for 
us to live in. We cannot govern or command in 
it as did the Lord, because we are not at one with 
his Father, therefore neither in harmony with his 
things, nor rulers over them. Our best power in 
regard to them is but to find out wonderful facts 
concerning them and their relations, and turn these 
facts to our uses on systems of our own. For we 
discover what we seem to discover, by working in- 
ward from without, while he works outward from 
within ; and we shall never understand the world, 
until we see it in the direction in which he works 



JESUS IN THE WORLD, 5 I 

making it — namely, from within outward. This, 
of course, we cannot do until we are one with him. 
In the meantime, so much are both we and his 
things his, that we can err concerning them only 
as he has made it possible for us to err ; we can 
wander only in the direction of the truth — if but 
to find that we can find nothing. 

Think for a moment how Jesus was at home 
among the things of his Father. It seems to me, 
I repeat, a spiritless explanation of his words — that 
the temple was the place where naturally he was 
at home. Does he make the least lamentation 
over the temple ? It is Jerusalem he weeps over 
— the men of Jerusalem, the killers, the stoners. 
What was his place of prayer? Not the temple, 
but the mountain-top. Where does he find sym- 
bols whereby to speak of what goes on in the mind 
and before the face of his Father in heaven ? Not 
in the temple ; not in its rites ; not on its altars ; 
not in its holy of holies ; he finds them in the world 
and its lovely-lowly facts ; on the roadside, in the 
field, in the vineyard, in the garden, in the house ; 
in the family, and the commonest of its affairs — 
the lighting of the lamp, the leavening of the meal, 
the neighbor's borrowing, the losing of the coin, 



52 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

the straying of the sheep. Even in the unlovely 
facts also of the world which he turns to holy use, 
such as the unjust judge, the false steward, the 
taithless laborers, he ignores the temple. See how 
he drives the devils from the souls and bodies of 
men, as we the wolves from our sheepfolds ! how 
before him the diseases, scaly and spotted, hurry 
and flee ! The world has for him no chamber of 
terror. He walks to the door of the sepulcher, the 
sealed cellar of his Father's house, and calls forth 
its four- days dead. He rebukes the mourners, he 
stays the funeral, and gives back the departed 
children to their parents' arms. The roughest of 
its servants do not make him wince ; none of them 
are so arrogant as to disobey his word ; he falls 
asleep in the midst of the storm that threatens to 
swallow his boat. Hear how, on that same occa- 
sion, he rebukes his disciples! The children to 
tremble at a gust of wind in the house! God's 
little ones afraid of the storm ! Hear him tell the 
watery floor to be still, and no longer toss his 
brothers ! see the watery floor obey him and grow 
still! See how the wandering creatures under it 
come at his call! See him leave his mountain- 
closet, and go walking over its heaving surface to 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 53 

the help of his men of little faith ! See how the 
world's water turns to wine ! how its bread grows 
more bread at his word! See how he goes from 
the house for a while, and returning with fresh 
power, takes what shape he pleases, walks through 
its closed doors, and goes up and down its invisible 
stairs ! 

All his life he was among his Father's things, 
either in heaven or in the world — not then only 
when they found him in the temple at Jerusalem. 
He is still among his Father's things, everywhere 
about in the world, everywhere throughout the 
wide universe. Whatever he laid aside to come to 
us, to whatever limitations, for our sake, he stooped 
his regal head, he dealt with the things about him 
in such lordly, childlike manner as made it clear 
they were not strange to him, but the things of his 
Father. He claimed none of them as his own, 
would not have had one of them his except through 
his Father. Only as his Fathers could he enjoy 
them ; — only as coming forth from the Father, and 
full of the Father's thought and nature, had they 
to him any existence. That the things were his 
Father's made them precious things to him. He 
had no care for having, as men count having. All 



54 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

his having was in the Father. I wonder if he ever 
put anything in his pocket : I doubt if he had one. 
Did he ever say, "■ This is mine, not yours " ? Did 
he not say, ''All things are mine, therefore they are 
yours " ? Oh, for his liberty among the things of 
the Father! Only by knowing them the things 
of our Father can we escape enslaving ourselves 
to them. Through the false, the infernal idea of 
having, of possessing them, we make them our 
tyrants, make the relation between them and us 
an evil thing. The world was a blessed place to 
Jesus, because everything in it was his Father's. 
What pain must it not have been to him, to see his 
brothers so vilely misuse the Father's house by 
grasping, each for himself, at the family things! 
If the knowledge that a spot in the landscape re- 
tains in it some pollution suffices to disturb our 
pleasure in the whole, how must it not have been 
with him, how must it not be with him now, in 
regard to the disfigurements and defilements caused 
by the greed of men, by their haste to be rich, in 
his Father's lovely house! 

Whoever is able to understand Wordsworth, or 
Henry Vaughan, when either speaks of the glori- 
ous insights of his childhood, will be able to imag- 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 55 

ine a little how Jesus must, in his eternal childhood, 
regard the world. 

Hear what Wordsworth says : 

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : 
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, 

Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar : 

Not in entire forgetfulness, 

And not in utter nakedness, 
But trailing clouds of glory do we come. 

From God, who is our home : 
Heaven lies about us in our infancy! 
Shades of the prison-house begin to close 

Upon the growing Boy, 
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows, 

He sees it in his joy ; 
The Youth, who daily farther from the east 

Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, 

And by the vision splendid 

Is on his way attended ; 
At length the Man perceives it die away. 
And fade into the light of common day. 

Hear what Henry Vaughan says : 

Happy those early dayes, when I 
Shin'd in my angell-infancy ! 
Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race. 
Or taught my soul to fancy ought 
But a white, celestiall thought ; 



56 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

When yet I had not walkt above 

A mile or two, from my first love, 

And looking back — at that short space — 

Could see a glimpse of His bright-face ; 

When on some gilded cloud, or flowre 

My gazing soul would dwell an houre, 

And in those weaker glories spy 

Some shadows of eternity ; 

Before I taught my tongue to wound 

My conscience with a sinfull sound. 

Or had the black art to dispence 

A sev'rall sinne to ev'ry sence. 

But felt through all this fleshly dresse 

Bright shootes of everlastingnesse. 

O how I long to travell back, 
And tread again that ancient track! 
That I might once more reach that plaine. 
Where first I left my glorious traine ; 
From whence th' inlightned spirit sees 
That shady City of palme trees. 

Whoever has thus gazed on flower or cloud; 
whoever can recall poorest memory of the trail of 
glory that hung about his childhood, must have 
some faint idea how his father's house and the 
things in it always looked, and must still look to 
the Lord. With him there is no fading into the 
light of common day. He has never lost his child- 
hood, the very essence of childhood being nearness 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 57 

to the Father and the outgoing of his creative 
love ; whence, with that insight of his eternal 
childhood of which the insight of the little ones 
here is a fainter repetition, he must see everything 
as the Father means it. The child sees things as 
the Father means him to see them, as he thought 
of them when he uttered them. For God is not 
only the Father of the child, but of the childhood 
that constitutes him a child, therefore the childness 
is of the divine nature. The child may not indeed 
be capable of looking into the Father's method, 
but he can in a measure understand his work, has 
therefore free entrance to his study and workshop 
both, and is welcome to find out what he can, with 
the fullest liberty to ask him questions. There 
are men too, who, at their best, see, in their lower 
measure, things as they are — as God sees them 
always. Jesus saw things just as his Father saw 
them in his creative imagination, when willing them 
out to the eyes of his children. But if he could 
always see the things of his Father even as some 
men and more children see them at times, he might 
well feel almost at home among them. He could 
not cease to admire, cease to love them. I say 
lovCy because the life in them, the presence of the 



58 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

creative One, would ever be plain to him. In the 
Perfect would familiarity ever destroy wonder at 
things essentially wonderful because essentially di- 
vine? To cease to wonder is to fall plumb- down 
from the childlike to the commonplace — the most 
undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can 
never be at home among things that are not won- 
derful to us. 

Could we see things always as we have some- 
times seen them — and as one day we must always 
see them, only far better — should we ever know 
dullness? Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of 
art, much as we might learn through the eyes and 
thoughts of other men, should we fly to these for 
deliverance from ennui, from any haunting discom- 
fort? Should we not just open our' own child- 
eyes, look upon the things themselves, and be 
consoled ? 

Jesus, then, would have his parents understand 
that he was in his Father's world among his 
Father's things, where was nothing to hurt him ; 
he knew them all, was in the secret of them all, 
could use and order them as did his Father. To 
this same I think all we humans are destined to 
rise. Though so many of us now are ignorant 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 59 

what kind of home we need, what a home we are 
capable of having, we too shall inherit the earth 
with the Son eternal, doing with it as we would — 
willing with the will of the Father. To such a 
home as we now inhabit, only perfected, and per- 
fectly beheld, we are traveling — never to reach it 
save by the obedience that makes us the children, 
therefore the heirs, of God. And, thank God! 
there the Father does not die that the children 
may inherit ; for, bliss of heaven ! we inherit with 
the Father. 

All the dangers of Jesus came from the priests, 
and the learned in the traditional law, whom his 
parents had not yet begun to fear on his behalf. 
They feared the dangers of the rugged way, the 
thieves and robbers of the hill- road. For the 
scribes and the Pharisees, the priests and the rulers 
— they would be the first to acknowledge their 
Messiah, their King! Little they imagined, when 
they found him where he ought to have been safest 
had it been indeed his Father's house, that there he 
sat amid lions — the great doctors of the temple! 
He could rule all the things in his Father's house, 
but not the men of religion, the men of the temple, 
who called his Father their Father. True, he 



6o THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

might have compelled them with a word, withered 
them by a glance, with a finger-touch made them 
grovel at his feet; but such supremacy over his 
brothers the Lord of hfe despised. He must rule 
them as his Father ruled himself; he would have 
them know themselves of the same family with 
himself; have them at home among the things of 
God, caring for the things he cared for, loving and 
hating as he and his Father loved and hated, ruling 
themselves by the essential laws of being. Because 
they would not be such, he let them do to him as 
they would, that he might get at their hearts by 
some unknown, unguarded door in their diviner 
part. '* I will be God among you ; I will be my- 
self to you. — You will not have me ? Then do to 
me as you will. The created shall have power 
over him through whom they were created, that 
they may be compelled to know him and his 
Father. They shall look on him whom they have 
pierced." 

His parents found him in the temple ; they never 
really found him until he entered the true temple 
— their own adoring hearts. The temple that 
knows not its builder is no temple ; in it dwells no 
divinity. But at length he comes to his own, and 



JESUS IN THE WORLD. 6 1 

his own receive him ; — comes to them in the might 
of his mission to preach good tidings to the poor, 
to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance, 
and sight, and liberty, and the Lord's own good 
time. 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 

And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up : and, 
as his custom was, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, 
and stood up for to read. And there was delivered unto him the 
book of the prophet Esaias. And when he had opened the book, 
he found the place where it was written, The Spirit of the Lord 
is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to 
the poor ; he hath sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach 
deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to 
set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year 
of the Lord. And he closed the book, and he gave it again to 
the minister, and sat down. And the eyes of all them that were 
in the synagogue were fastened on him. And he began to say 
unto them. This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears. — 
Luke iv. 1 6-2 1. 

The Lord's sermon upon the mount seems such 
an enlargement of these words of the prophet as 
might, but for the refusal of the men of Nazareth 
to listen to him, have followed his reading of them 
here recorded. That, as given by the evangelist, 
they correspond to neither of the differing orig- 
inals of the English and Greek versions, ought to 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 63 

be enough in itself to do away with the spirit- 
ually vulgar notion of the verbal inspiration of the 
Scriptures. 

The point at which the Lord stops in his reading 
is suggestive: he closes the book, leaving the 
words " and the day of vengeance of our God," or, 
as in the Septuagint, ** the day of recompense," 
unread : God's vengeance is as holy a thing as his 
love, yea, is love, for God is love and God is not 
vengeance; but, apparently, the Lord would not 
give the word a place in his announcement of his 
mission : his hearers would not recognize it as a 
form of the Father's love, but as vengeance on their 
enemies, not vengeance on the selfishness of those 
who would not be their brother's keeper. 

He had not begun with Nazareth, neither with 
Galilee. **A prophet has no honor in his own 
country," he said, and began to teach where it was 
more likely he would be heard. It is true that he 
wrought his first miracle in Cana, but that was at 
his mother's request, not of his own intent, and he 
did not begin his teaching there. He went first to 
Jerusalem, there cast out the buyers and sellers 
from the temple, and did other notable things al- 
luded to by St. John ; then went back to Galilee, 



64 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

where, having seen the things he did in Jerusalem, 
his former neighbors were now prepared to Hsten 
to him. Of these the Nazarenes, to whom the 
sight of him was more familiar, retained the most 
prejudice against him : he belonged to their very 
city! they had known him from a child! — and 
low, indeed, are they in whom familiarity with the 
high and true breeds contempt! they are judged 
already. Yet such was the fame of the new 
prophet, that even they were willing to hear in the 
synagogue what he had to say to them — thence 
to determine for themselves what claim he had to 
an honorable reception. But the eye of their judg- 
ment was not single, therefore was their body full 
of darkness. Should Nazareth indeed prove, to 
their self- glorifying satisfaction, the city of the 
great Prophet, they were more than ready to grasp 
at the renown of having produced him : he was in- 
deed the great Prophet, and within a few minutes 
they would have slain him for the honor of Israel. 
In the ignoble even the love of their country par- 
takes largely of the ignoble. 

There was a shadow of the hateless vengeance 
of God in the expulsion of the dishonest dealers 
from the temple with which the Lord initiated his 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 65 

mission : that was his first parable to Jerusalem ; 
to Nazareth he comes with the sweetest words of 
the prophet of hope in his mouth — good tidings of 
great joy — of healing and sight and liberty ; fol- 
lowed by the godlike announcement, that what the 
prophet had promised he was come to fulfil. His 
heart, his eyes, his lips, his hands — his whole body 
is full of gifts for men, and that day was that 
Scripture fulfilled in their ears. The prophecy had 
gone before that he should save his people from 
their sins ; he brings an announcement they will 
better understand : he is come, he says, to deliver 
men from sorrow and pain, ignorance and oppres- 
sion, everything that makes life hard and un- 
friendly. What a gracious speech, what a daring 
pledge to a world whelmed in tyranny and wrong ! 
To the women of it, I imagine, it sounded the 
sweetest, in them woke the highest hopes. They 
had scarce had a hearing when the Lord came ; 
and thereupon things began to mend with them, 
and are mending still, for the Lord is at work, and 
will be. He is the refuge of the oopressed. By 
its very woes, as by bitterest medicine, he is set- 
ting the world free from sin and woe. This very 

hour he is curing its disease, the symptoms of 

5 



66 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

which are so varied and so painful ; working none 
the less faithfully that the sick, taking the symp- 
toms for the disease, cry out against the incompe- 
tence of their physician. '' What power can heal 
the broken-hearted?" they cry. And indeed it 
takes a God to do it, but the God is here ! In yet 
better words than those of the prophet, spoken 
straight from his own heart, he cries : ** Come unto 
me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest." He calls to him every heart 
knowing its own bitterness, speaks to the troubled 
consciousness of every child of the Father. He is 
come to free us from everything that makes life 
less than bliss essential. No other could be a gos- 
pel worthy of the God of men. 

Every one will, I presume, confess to more or 
less misery. Its apparent source may be this or 
that ; its real source is, to use a poor figure, a dis- 
location* of the juncture between the created and 
the creating life. This primal evil is the parent of 
evils unnumbered, hence of miseries multitudinous, 
under the weight of which the arrogant man cries 
out against life, and goes on to misuse it, while the 
child looks around for help — and who shall help 
him but his Father! The Father is with him all 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 6 J 

the time, but it may be long ere the child knows 
himself in his arms. His heart may be long 
troubled as well as his outer life. The dank mists 
of doubtful thought may close around his way, and 
hide from him the Light of the world! cold winds 
from the desert of foiled endeavor may sorely buf- 
fet and for a time baffle his hope ; but every now 
and then the blue pledge of a great sky will break 
through the clouds over his head; and a faint 
aurora will walk his darkest East. Gradually he 
grows more capable of imagining a world in which 
every good thing thinkable may be a fact. Best 
of all, the story of him who is himself the good 
news, the gospel of God, becomes not only more 
and more believable to his heart, but more and 
more ministrant to his life of conflict, and his assur- 
ance of a living Father who hears when his chil- 
dren cry. The gospel according to this or that 
expounder of it may repel him unspeakably ; the 
gospel according to Jesus Christ attracts him su- 
premely, and ever holds where it has drawn him. 
To the priest, the scribe, the elder, exclaiming 
against his self-sufficiency in refusing what they 
teach, he answers, " It is life or death to me. 
Your gospel I cannot take. To believe as you 



68 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

would have me believe would be to lose my God. 
Your God is no God to me. I do not desire him. 
I would rather die the death than believe in such 
a God. In the name of the true God, I cast your 
gospel from me ; it is no gospel, and to believe it 
would be to wrong him in whom alone lies my 
hope." 

" But to believe in such a man," he might go on 
to say, '' with such a message as I read of in the 
New Testament, is Hfe from the dead. I have 
yielded myself, to live no more in the idea of self, 
but with the life of God. To him I commit the 
creature he has made, that he may live in it, and 
work out its life — develop it according to the idea 
of it in his own creating mind. I fall in with his 
ways for me. I believe in him. I trust him. I 
try to obey him. I look to be rendered capable of 
and receive a pure vision of his will, freedom from 
the prison-house of my limitation, from the bond- 
age of a finite existence. For the finite that dwells 
in the infinite, and in which the infinite dwells, is 
finite no longer. Those who are thus children in- 
deed, are little Gods, the divine brood of the infi- 
nite Father. No mere promise of deliverance from 
the consequences of sin would be any gospel to 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 69 

me. Less than the liberty of a holy heart, less 
than the freedom of the Lord himself, will never 
satisfy one human soul. Father, set me free in 
the glory of thy will, so that I will only as thou 
wiliest. Thy will be at once thy perfection and 
mine. Thou alone art deliverance — absolute 
safety from every cause and kind of trouble that 
ever existed, anywhere now exists, or ever can 
exist in thy universe." 

But the people of the Lord's town, to whom he 
read, appropriating them, the gracious words of 
the prophet, were of the wise and prudent of their 
day. With one and the same breath they seem to 
cry, " These things are good, it is true, but they 
must come after our way. We must have the 
promise to our fathers fulfilled — that we shall rule 
the world, the chosen of God, the children of 
Abraham and Israel. We want to be a free peo- 
ple, manage our own affairs, live in plenty, and do 
as we please. Liberty alone can ever cure the 
woes of which you speak. We do not need to be 
better; we are well enough. Give us riches and 
honor, and keep us content with ourselves, that 
we may be satisfied with our own likeness, and 
thou shalt be the Messiah." Never, perhaps, 



70 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

would such be men's spoken words, but the pre- 
vaiHng condition of their minds might often well 
take form in such speech. Whereon will they 
ground their complaint should God give them their 
hearts' desire? When that desire given closes in 
upon them with a torturing sense of slavery ; when 
they find that what they have imagined their 
own will was but a suggestion they knew not 
whence ; when they discover that life is not good, 
yet they cannot die ; will they not then turn and 
entreat their Maker to save them after his own 
fashion ? 

Let us try to understand the brief, elliptical nar- 
rative of what took place in the synagogue of 
Nazareth on the occasion of our Lord's announce- 
ment of his mission. 

'' This day," said Jesus, *^ is this scripture ful- 
filled in your ears; " and went on with his divine 
talk. We shall yet know, I trust, what ^' the gra- 
cious words " were " which proceeded out of his 
mouth " : surely some who heard them still re- 
member them, for '' all bare him witness, and won- 
dered at" them! How did they bear him wit- 
ness? Surely not alone by the intensity of their 
wondering gaze! Must not the narrator mean 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. J I 

that their hearts bore witness to the power of his 
presence, that they felt the appeal of his soul to 
theirs, that they said in themselves, *' Never man 
spake like this man " ? Must not the Hght of truth 
in his face, beheld of such even as knew not the 
truth, have lifted their souls up truth ward? Was 
it not the something true, common to all hearts, 
that bore the wondering witness to the gracious- 
ness of his words ? Had not those words found a 
way to the pure human, that is, the divine in the 
men? Was it not therefore that they were drawn 
to him — all but ready to accept him? — on their 
own terms, alas, not his! For a moment he 
seemed to them a true messenger, but truth in him 
was not truth to them: had he been what they 
took him for, he would have been no savior. They 
were, however, though partly by mistake, well dis- 
posed toward him, and it was with a growing sense 
of being honored by his relation to them, and the 
property they had in him, that they said, " Is not 
this Joseph's son?" 

But the Lord knew what was in their hearts ; he 
knew the false notion with which they were almost 
ready to declare for him ; he knew also the final 
proof to which they were in their wisdom and pru- 



72 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

dence about to subject him. He did not look likely 
to be a prophet, seeing he had grown up among 
them, and had never shown any credentials : they 
had a right to proof positive ! They had heard of 
wonderful things he had done in other places : why 
had they not first of all been done in their sight ? 
Who had a claim equal to theirs? who so capable 
as they to pronounce judgment on his mission 
whether false or true : had they not known him 
from childhood? His words were gracious, but 
words were nothing: he must do something — 
something wonderful! Without such conclusive, 
satisfying proof, Nazareth at least would never 
acknowledge him! 

They were quite ready for the honor of having 
any true prophet, such as it seemed not- impossible 
the son of Joseph might turn out to be, recognized 
as their townsman, one of their own people : if he 
were such, theirs was the credit of having produced 
him ! Then indeed they were ready to bear wit- 
ness to him, take his part, adopt his cause, and be- 
fore the world stand up for him ! As to his being 
the Messiah, that was merest absurdity : did they 
not all know his father, the carpenter? He might, 
however, be the prophet whom so many of the 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 73 

best in the nation were at the moment expecting! 
Let him do something wonderful ! 

They were not a gracious people, or a good. 
The Lord saw their thought, and it was far from 
being to his mind. He desired no such reception 
as they were at present equal to giving a prophet. 
His mighty works were not meant for such as they 
— to convince them of what they were incapable of 
understanding or welcoming! Those who would 
not believe without signs and wonders could never 
believe worthily with any number of them, and 
none should be given them! His mighty works 
were to rouse the love and strengthen the faith of 
the meek and lowly in heart, of such as were ready 
to come to the light, and show that they were of 
the light. He knew how poor the meaning the 
Nazarenes put on the words he had read; what 
low expectations they had of the Messiah when 
most they longed for his coming. They did not 
hear the prophet while he read the prophet ! At 
sight of a few poor little wonders, nothing to him, 
to them sufficient to prove him such a Messiah as 
tkey looked for, they would burst into loud ac- 
claim, and rush to their arms, eager, his officers 
and soldiers, to open the one triumphant campaign 



74 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

against the accursed Romans, and sweep them be- 
yond the borders of their sacred country ! Their 
Messiah would make of their nation the redeemed 
of the Lord, themselves the favorites of his court, 
and the tyrants of the world ! Salvation from their 
sins was not in their hearts, not in their imagina- 
tions, not at all in their thoughts. They had heard 
him read his commission to heal the broken- 
hearted ; they would rush to break hearts in his 
name. The Lord knew them and their vain ex- 
pectations. He would have no such followers — no 
followers on false conceptions — no followers whom 
wonders would dehght but nowise better! The 
Nazarenes were not yet of the sort that needed 
but one change to be his people. He had come 
to give them help; until they accepted his, they 
could have none to give him. 

The Lord never did mighty work in proof of his 
mission; to help a growing faith in himself and 
his Father, he would do anything! He healed 
those whom healing would deeper heal — those in 
whom suffering had so far done its work that its 
removal also would carry it on. To the Nazarenes 
he would not manifest his power; they were not 
in a condition to get good from such manifestation : 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 75 

it would but confirm their present arrogance and 
ambition. Wonderful works can only nourish a 
faith already existent ; to him who believes with- 
out it, a miracle 7nay be granted. It was the Is- 
raelite indeed, whom the Lord met with miracle : 
" Because I said unto thee, I saw thee under the 
fig-tree, believest thou? Thou shalt see the an- 
gels of God ascending and descending on the Son 
of Man." Those who laughed him to scorn were 
not allowed to look on the resurrection of the 
daughter of Jairus. Peter, when he would walk 
on the water, had both permission and power given 
him to do so. The widow received the prophet, 
and was fed ; the Syrian went to the prophet, and 
was cured. In Nazareth, because of unbelief, the 
Lord could only lay his hands on a few sick folk ; 
in the rest was none of that leaning toward the 
truth, which alone can make room for the help of a 
miracle. This they soon made manifest. 

The Lord saw them on the point of challenging 
a display of his power, and anticipated the chal- 
lenge with a refusal. 

For the better understanding of his words, let 
me presume to paraphrase them : " I know you 
will apply to me the proverb. Physician, heal thy- 



']6 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

self, requiring me to prove what is said of me in 
Capernaum, by doing the same here ; but there is 
another proverb, No prophet is accepted in his own 
country. Unaccepted I do nothing wonderful. 
In the great famine, Elijah was sent to no widow 
of the many in Israel, but to a Sidonian; and 
EHsha cured no leper of the many in Israel, but 
Naaman the Syrian. There are those fit to see 
signs and wonders; they are not always the kin 
of the prophet." 

The Nazarenes heard with indignation. Their 
wonder at his gracious words was changed to bit- 
terest wrath. The very beams of their ugly re- 
ligion were party- spirit, exclusiveness, and pride 
in the fancied favor of God for them only of all 
the nations : to hint at the possibility of a revela- 
tion of the glory of God to a stranger ; far more, 
to hint that a stranger might be fitter to receive 
such a revelation than a Jew, was an offense reach- 
ing to the worst insult ; and it was cast in their 
teeth by a common man of their own city ! '' Thou 
art but a well-known carpenter's son, and dost 
thou teach us ! Barest thou imply a divine pref- 
erence for Capernaum over Nazareth?" In bad. 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. J J 

odor with the rest of their countrymen, they were 
the prouder of themselves. 

The whole synagogue, observe, rose in a fury. 
Such a fellow a prophet ! He was worse than the 
worst of Gentiles! he was a false Jew! a traitor 
to his God! a friend of the idol-worshiping Ro- 
mans! Away with him! His townsmen led the 
van in his rejection by his own. The men of 
Nazareth would have forestalled his crucifixion 
by them of Jerusalem. What ! a Sidonian woman 
fitter to receive the prophet than any Jewess! a 
heathen worthier to be kept alive by miracle in 
time of famine than a worshiper of the true God! 
a leper of Damascus less displeasing to God than 
the lepers of his chosen race ! It was no longer 
condescending approval that shone in their eyes. 
He a prophet ! They had seen through him ! Soon 
had they found him out! The moment he per- 
ceived it useless to pose for a prophet with them, 
who had all along known the breed of him, he had 
turned to insult them ! He dared not attempt in 
his own city the deceptions with which, by the 
help of Satan, he had made such a grand show, 
and fooled the idiots of -Capernaum! He saw 



78 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

they knew him too well, were too wide-awake to 
be cozened by him, and, to avoid their expected 
challenge, fell to reviling the holy nation. Let 
him take the consequences! To the brow of the 
hill with him! 

How could there be any miracle for such ! They 
were well satisfied with themselves, and 

Nothing almost sees miracles 
But misery. 

Need and the upward look, the mood ready to be- 
lieve when and where it can, the embryonic faith, 
is dear to him whose love would have us trust him. 
Let any man seek him — not in curious inquiry 
whether the story of him may be true or cannot be 
true — in humble readiness to accept him altogether 
if only he can, and he shall find him ; • we shall not 
fail of help to believe because we doubt. But if 
the questioner be such that the dispersion of his 
doubt would but leave him in disobedience, the 
Power of truth has no care to effect his conviction. 
Why cast out a devil that the man may the better 
do the work of the devil? The childlike doubt 
will, as it softens and yields, minister nourishment 
with all that was good in it to the faith- germ at its 
heart ; the wise and prudent unbelief will be left 



JESUS AND HIS FELLOW TOWNSMEN. 79 

to develop its own misery. The Lord could easily 
have satisfied the Nazarenes that he was the Mes- 
siah : they would but have hardened into the nu- 
cleus of an army for the subjugation of the world. 
To a warfare with their own sins, to the subjuga- 
tion of their doing and desiring to the will of the 
great Father, all the miracles in his power would 
never have persuaded them. A true convince- 
ment is not possible to hearts and minds like theirs. 
Not only is it impossible for a low man to believe 
a thousandth part of what a noble man can, but a 
low man cannot believe anything as a noble man 
believes it. The men of Nazareth could have be- 
lieved in Jesus as their savior from the Romans ; 
as their savior from their sins they could not be- 
lieve in him, for they loved their sins. The King 
of heaven came to offer them a share in his king- 
dom; but they were not poor in spirit, and the 
kingdom of heaven was not for them. Gladly 
would they have inherited the earth; but they 
were not meek, and the earth was for the lowly 
children of the perfect Father. 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 

And he opened his mouth and taught them, saying, Blessed 
are the poor in spirit ; for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. . . . 
Blessed are the meek ; for they shall inherit the earth. — Matthew 
V. 2, 3, 5. 

The words of the Lord are the seed sown by 
the sower. Into our hearts they must fall that 
they may grow. Meditation and prayer must 
water them, and obedience keep them in the sun- 
light. Thus will they bear fruit for the Lord's 
gathering. 

Those of his disciples, that is, obedient hearers, 
who had any experience in trying to live, would, 
in part, at once understand them ; but as they 
obeyed and pondered, the meaning of them would 
keep growing. This we see in the writings of the 
apostles. It will be so with us also, who need to 
understand everything he said neither more nor 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 8 1 

less than they to whom first he spoke ; while our 
obligation to understand is far greater than theirs 
at the time, inasmuch as we have had nearly two 
thousand years' experience of the continued com- 
ing of the kingdom he then preached: it is not 
yet come ; it has been all the time, and is now, 
drawing slowly nearer. 

The sermon on the mount, as it is commonly 
called, seems the Lord's first free utterance, in the 
presence of any large assembly, of the good news 
of the kingdom. He had 'been teaching his dis- 
ciples and messengers; and had already brought 
the glad tidings that his Father was their Father 
to many besides — to Nathanael for one, to Nicode- 
mus, to the woman of Samaria, to every one he 
had cured, every one whose cry for help he had 
heard : his epiphany was a gradual thing, begin- 
ning, where it continues, with rfie individual. It is 
impossible even to guess at what number may have 
heard him on this occasion : he seems to have gone 
up the mount because of the crowd — to secure a 
somewhat opener position whence he could better 
speak ; and thither followed him those who desired 
to be taught of him, accompanied doubtless by not 

a few in whom curiosity was the chief motive. Dis- 
6 



82 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

ciple or gazer, he addressed the individuality of 
every one that had ears to hear. Peter and An- 
drew, James and John, are all we know as his 
recognized disciples, followers, and companions, at 
the time ; but, while his words were addressed to 
such as had come to him desiring to learn of him, 
the things he uttered were eternal truths, life in 
which was essential for every one of his Father's 
children, therefore they were for all : he who heard 
to obey was his disciple. 

How different, at the first sound of it, must the 
good news have been from the news anxiously ex- 
pected by those who waited for the Messiah! 
Even the Baptist in prison lay listening after some- 
thing of quite another sort. The Lord had to send 
him a message, by eye-witnesses of his doings, to 
remind him that God's thoughts are not as our 
thoughts, or his ways as our ways — that the design 
of God is other and better than the expectation of 
men. His summary of the gifts he was giving to 
men culminated with the preaching of the good 
news to the poor. If John had known these his 
doings before, he had not recognized them as be- 
longing to the Lord's special mission : the Lord 
tells him it is not enough to have accepted him as 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 83 

the Messiah; he must recognize his doings as the 
work he had come into the world to do, and as in 
their nature so divine as to be the very business 
of the Son of God in whom the Father was well 
pleased. 

Wherein then consisted the goodness of the news 
which he. opened his mouth to give them ? What 
was in the news to make the poor glad? Why- 
was his arrival with such words in his heart and 
mouth the coming of the kingdom? 

All good news from heaven is of truth — essen- 
tial truth, involving duty, and giving and promis- 
ing help to the performance of it. There can be 
no good news for us men, except of uplifting love, 
and no one can be lifted up who will not rise. If 
God himself sought to raise his little ones without 
their consenting effort, they would drop from his 
foiled endeavor. He will carry us in his arms till 
we are able to walk ; he will carry us in his arms 
when we are weary with walking; he will not 
carry us if we will not walk. 

Very different is the good news Jesus brings us 
from certain prevalent representations of the gos- 
pel, founded on the pagan notion that suffering is 
an offset for sin, and culminating in the vile asser- 



84 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

tion that the suffering of an innocent man, just be- 
cause he is innocent, yea, perfect, is a satisfaction 
to the holy Father for the evil deeds of his chil- 
dren. As a theory concerning the atonement noth- 
ing could be worse, either intellectually, morally, 
or spiritually ; announced as the gospel itself, as 
the good news of the kingdom of heaven, the idea 
is monstrous as any Chinese dragon. Such a so- 
called gospel is no gospel, however accepted as 
God sent by good men of a certain development. 
It is evil news, dwarfing, enslaving, maddening — 
news to the child-heart of the dreariest damnation. 
Doubtless some elements of the gospel are mixed 
up with it on most occasions of its announcement; 
none the more is it the message received from him. 
It can be good news only to such as are prudently 
willing to be delivered from a God they fear, but 
unable to accept the gospel of a perfect God, in 
whom to trust perfectly. 

The good news of Jesus was just the news of 
the thoughts and ways of the Father in the midst 
of his family. He told them that the way men 
thought for themselves and their children was not 
the way God thought for himself and his children ; 
that the kingdom of heaven was founded, and must 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 85 

at length show itself founded, on very different 
principles from those of the kingdoms and families 
of the world, meaning by the world that part of 
the Father's family which will not be ordered by 
him, will not even try to obey him. The world's 
man, its great, its successful, its honorable man, is 
he who may have and do what he pleases, whose 
strength lies in money and the praise of men ; the 
greatest in the kingdom of heaven is the man who 
is humblest and serves his fellows the most. Mul- 
titudes of men, in no degree notable as ambitious 
or proud, hold the ambitious, the proud man in 
honor, and, for all deliverance, hope after some 
shadow of his prosperity. How many even of 
those who look for the world to come seek to the 
powers of this world for deliverance from its evils, 
as if God were the God of the world to come only ! 
The oppressed of the Lord's time looked for a 
Messiah to set their nation free, and make it rich 
and strong ; the oppressed of our time believe in 
money, knowledge, and the will of a people which 
needs but power to be in its turn the oppressor. 
The first words of the Lord on this occasion were : 
'' Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven." 



86 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

It Is not the proud, it is not the greedy of dis- 
tinction, it is not those who gather and hoard, not 
those who lay down the law to their neighbors, 
not those that condescend, any more than those 
that shrug the shoulder and shoot out the lip, that 
have any share in the kingdom of the Father. 
That kingdom has no relation with or resemblance 
to the kingdoms of this world, deals with no one 
thing that distinguishes their rulers, except to re- 
pudiate it. The Son of God will favor no smallest 
ambition, be it in the heart of him who leans on his 
bosom. The kingdom of God, the refuge of the 
oppressed, the golden age of the new world, the 
real Utopia, the newest yet oldest Atlantis, the 
home of the children, will not open its gates to 
the most miserable who would rise above his equal 
in misery, who looks down on any one more mis- 
erable than himself. It is the home of perfect 
brotherhood. The poor, the beggars in spirit, the 
humble men of heart, the unambitious, the unself- 
ish ; those who never despise men, and never seek 
their praises; the lowly, who see nothing to ad- 
mire in themselves, therefore cannot seek to be ad- 
mired of others; the men who give themselves 
away — these are the freemen of the kingdom, these 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. Sj 

are the citizens of the new Jerusalem. The men 
who are aware of their own essential poverty ; not 
the men who are poor in friends, poor in influence, 
poor in acquirements, poor in money, but those who 
are poor in spirit, who feel themselves poor creat- 
ures ; w^ho know nothing to be pleased with them- 
selves for, and desire nothing to make them think 
well of themselves; who know that they need 
much to make their life worth living, to make their 
existence a good thing, to make them fit to live ; 
these humble ones are the poor whom the Lord 
calls blessed. When a man says, I am low and 
worthless, then the gate of the kingdom begins to 
open to him, for there enter the true, and this man 
has begun to know the truth concerning himself. 
Whatever such a man has attained to, he straight- 
way forgets ; it is part of him and behind him ; his 
business is with what he has not, wdth the things 
that lie above and before him. The man who is 
proud of anything he thinks he has reached, has 
not reached it. He is but proud of himself, and 
imagining a cause for his pride. If he had reached, 
he would already have begun to forget. He who 
delights in contemplating whereto he has attained, 
is not merely sliding back; he is already in the 



88 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

dirt of self-satisfaction. The gate of the kingdom 
is closed, and he outside. The child who, clinging 
to his Father, dares not think he has in any sense 
attained while as yet he is not as his Father — his 
Father's heart, his Father's heaven is his natural 
home. To find himself thinking of himself as above 
his fellows would be to that child a shuddering 
terror; his universe would contract around him, 
his ideal wither on its throne. The least motion 
of self-satisfaction, the first thought of placing him- 
self in the forefront of estimation, would be to him 
a flash from the nether abyss. God is his life and 
his lord. That his Father should be content with 
him must be all his care. Among his relations 
with his neighbor, infinitely precious, comparison 
with his neighbor has no place. Which is the 
greater is of no account. He would not choose to 
be less than his neighbor; he would choose his 
neighbor to be greater than he. He looks up to 
every man. Otherwise gifted than he, his neigh- 
bor is more than he. All come from the one 
mighty Father: shall he judge the live thoughts 
of God, which is greater and which is less? In 
thus denying, thus turning his back on himself, he 
has no thought of saintliness, no thought but of 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH 89 

his Father and his brethren. To such a child 
heaven's best secrets are open. He clambers about 
the throne of the Father unrebuked ; his back is 
ready for the smallest heavenly playmate; his 
arms are an open refuge for any blackest little lost 
kid of the Father's flock; he will toil with it up 
the heavenly stair, up the very steps of the great 
white throne, to lay it on the Father's knees. For 
the glory of that Father is not in knowing himself 
God, but in giving himself away — in creating ^nd 
redeeming and glorifying his children. 

The man who does not house self has room to 
be his real self — God's eternal idea of him. He 
lives eternally; in virtue of the creative power 
present in him with momently unimpeded crea- 
tion, he is. How should there be in him one 
thought of ruling or commanding or surpassing! 
He can imagine no bliss, no good in being greater 
than some one else. He is unable to wish himself 
other than he is, except more what God made him 
for, which is indeed the highest willing of the will 
of God. His brother's well-being is essential to 
his bliss. The thought of standing higher in the 
favor of God than his brother would make him 
miserable. He would lift every brother to the 



90 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

embrace of the Father. Blessed are the poor in 
spirit, for they are of the same spirit as God, and 
of nature the kingdom of heaven is theirs. 

" Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth," expresses the same principle : the same law 
holds in the earth as in the kingdom of heaven. 
How should it be otherwise ? Has the Creator of 
the ends of the earth ceased to rule it after his 
fashion, because his rebelHous children have so 
long, to their own hurt, vainly endeavored to rule 
it after theirs? The kingdom of heaven belongs 
to the poor ; the meek shall inherit the earth. The 
earth as God sees it, as those to whom the king- 
dom of heaven belongs also see it, is good, all good, 
very good, fit for the meek to inherit ; and one day 
they shall inherit it — not indeed as men of the 
world count inheritance, but as the Maker and 
Owner of the world has from the first counted it. 
So different are the two ways of inheriting, that 
one of the meek may be heartily enjoying his pos- 
session, while one of the proud is selfishly walling 
him out from the spot in it he loves best. 

The meek are those that do not assert them- 
selves, do not defend themselves, never dream of 
avenging themselves, or of returning aught but 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 9 1 

good for evil. They do not imagine it their busi- 
ness to take care of themselves. The meek man 
may indeed take much thought, but it will not be 
for himself. He never builds an exclusive wall, 
shuts any honest neighbor out. He will not al- 
ways serve the wish, but always the good of his 
neighbor. His service must be true service. Self 
shall be no umpire in affair of his. Man's con- 
sciousness of himself is but a shadow: the meek 
man's self always vanishes in the light of a real 
presence. His nature lies open to the Father of 
men, and to every good impulse is as it were 
empty. No bristling importance, no vain attend- 
ance of fancied rights and wrongs guards his door, 
or crowds the passages of his house ; they are for 
the angels to come and go. Abandoned thus to 
the truth, as the sparks from the gleaming river 
dip into the flowers of Dante's unperfected vision, 
so the many souls of the visible world, lights from 
the Father of lights, enter his heart freely; and 
by them he inherits the earth he was created to 
inherit — possesses it as his Father made him capa- 
ble of possessing, and the earth of being possessed. 
Because the man is meek, his eye is single; he 
sees things as God sees them, as he would have 



92 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

his child see them : to confront creation with pure 
eyes is to possess it. 

How Httle is the man able to make his own, 
who would ravish all! The man who, by the ex- 
clusion of others from the space he calls his, would 
grasp any portion of the earth as his own, befools 
himself in the attempt. The very bread he has 
swallowed cannot so in any real sense be his. 
There does not exist such a power of possessing 
as he would arrogate. There is not such a sense 
of having as that of which he has conceived the 
shadow in his degenerate and lapsing imagination. 
The real owner of his demesne is that peddler pass- 
ing his gate, into a divine soul receiving the sweet- 
nesses which not all the greed of the so- counted 
possessor can keep within his walls : they overflow 
the cup-lip of the coping, to give themselves to 
the footfarer. The motions aerial, the sounds, the 
odors of those imprisoned spaces, are the earnest 
of a possession for which is ever growing his power 
of possessing. In no wise will such inheritance 
interfere with the claim of the man who calls them 
his. Each possessor has them his, as much as 
each in his own way is capable of possessing them. 
For possession is determined by the kind and the 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 93 

scope of the power of possessing; and the earth 
has a fourth dimension of which the mere owner 
of its soil knows nothing. 

The child of the maker is naturally the inheritor. 
But if the child try to possess as a house the thing 
his father made an organ, will he succeed in so 
possessing it? Or if he do nestle in a corner of 
its case, will he oust thereby the lord of its multi- 
plex harmony, sitting regnant on the seat of sway, 
and drawing with ''volant touch" from the house 
of the child the liege homage of its rendered 
wealth? To the poverty of such a child are all 
those left who think to have and to hold after the 
corrupt fancies of a greedy self. 

We cannot see the world as God means it, save 
in proportion as our souls are meek. In meekness 
only are we its inheritors. Meekness alone makes 
the spiritual retina pure to receive God's things as 
they are, mingling with them neither imperfection 
nor impurity of its own. A thing so beheld that it 
conveys to me the divine thought issuing in its 
form, is mine ; by nothing but its mediation be- 
tween God and my life can anything be mine. 
The man so dull as to insist that a thing is his be- 
cause he has bought it and paid for it, had better 



94 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

bethink himself that not all the combined forces of 
law, justice, and good- will can keep it his ; while 
even death cannot take the world from the man 
who possesses it as alone the Maker of him and it 
cares that he should possess it. This man leaves 
it, but carries it with him ; that man carries with 
him only its loss. He passes, unable to close hand 
or mouth upon any portion of it. Its ownness to 
him was but the changes he could make in it, and 
the nearness into which he could bring it to the 
body he lived in. That body the earth in its turn 
possesses now, and it lies very still, changing noth- 
ing, but being changed. Is this the fine of the 
great buyer of land, to have his fine pate full of 
fine dirt? In the soul of the meek, the earth re- 
mains an endless possession — his because he who 
made it is his — his as nothing but his Maker could 
ever be the creature's. He has the earth by his 
divine relation to him who sent it forth from him 
as a tree sends out its leaves. To inherit the earth 
is to grow ever more alive to the presence, in it 
and in all its parts, of him who is the life of men. 
How far one may advance in such inheritance 
while yet in the body, will simply depend on the 
meekness he attains while yet in the body ; but it 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 95 

may be, as Frederick Denison Maurice, the servant 
of God, thought while yet he was with us, that the 
new heavens and the new earth are the same in 
which we now Uve, righteously inhabited by the 
meek, with their deeper-opened eyes. What if 
the meek of the dead be thus possessing it even 
now! But I do not care to speculate. It is 
enough that the man who refuses to assert himself, 
seeking no recognition by men, leaving the care of 
his life to the Father, and occupying himself with 
the will of the Father, shall find himself, by and 
by, at home in the Father's house, with all the 
Father's property his. 

Which is more the possessor of the world — he 
who has a thousand houses, or he who, without 
one house to call his own, has ten in which his 
knock at the door would rouse instant jubilation? 
Which is the richer — the man who, his large money 
spent, would have no refuge ; or he for whose 
necessity a hundred would sacrifice comfort? 
Which of the two possessed the earth — king 
Agrippa or tent-maker Paul? 

Which is the real possessor of a book — the man 
who has its original and every following edition, 
and shows, to many an admiring and envying vis- 



96 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

itor, now this, now that, in binding characteristic, 
with possessor-pride; yea, from secret shrine is 
able to draw forth and display the author's manu- 
script, with the very shapes in which his thoughts 
came forth to the light of day, — or the man who 
cherishes one little, hollow-backed, coverless, un- 
titled, bethumbed copy, which he takes with him 
in his solitary walks and broods over in his silent 
chamber, always finding in it some beauty or ex- 
cellence or aid he had not found before — which is 
to him in truth as a live companion ? 

For what makes the thing a book ? Is it not 
that it has a soul — the mind in it of him who wrote 
the book? Therefore only can the book be pos- 
sessed, for life alone can be the possession of life. 
The dead possess their dead only to bury them. 

Does not he, then, who loves and understands his 
book, possess it with such possession as is impos- 
sible to the other? Just so may the world itself 
be possessed — either as a volume unread, or as the 
wine of a soul, " the precious life-blood of a mas- 
ter-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose 
to a life beyond life." It may be possessed as a 
book filled with words from the mouth of God, or 
but as the golden-clasped covers of that book ; as 



THE HEIRS OF HEAVEN AND EARTH. 97 

an embodiment or incarnation of God himself; or 
but as a house built to sell. The Lord loved the 
world and the things of the world, not as the men 
of the world love them, but finding his Father in 
everything that came from his Father's heart. 

The same spirit, then, is required for possessing 
the kingdom of heaven, and for inheriting the 
earth. How should it not be so, when the one 
Power is the informing life of both ? If we are the 
Lord's, we possess the kingdom of heaven, and so 
inherit the earth. How many who call themselves 
by his name would have it otherwise : they would 
possess the earth and inherit the kingdom ! Such 
fill churches and chapels on Sundays: anywhere 
suits for the worship of Mammon. 

Yet verily, earth as well as heaven may be 
largely possessed even now. 

Two men are walking abroad together; to the 
one, the world yields thought after thought of de- 
light ; he sees heaven and earth embrace one an- 
other; he feels an indescribable presence over and 
in them; his joy will afterward, in the solitude of 
his chamber, break forth in song; — to the other, 
oppressed with the thought of his poverty, or rumi- 
nating how to make much into more, the glory of 



98 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

the Lord is but a warm summer day ; it enters in 
at no window of his soul; it offers him no gift; 
for, in the very temple of God, he looks for no God 
in it. Nor must there needs be two men to think 
and feel thus differently. In what diverse fashion 
will any one subject to ever-changing mood see the 
same world of the same glad Creator! Alas for 
men, if it changed as we change, if it grew mean- 
ingless when we grow faithless! Thought for a 
morrow that may never come, dread of the divid- 
ing death which works for endless companionship, 
anger with one we love, will cloud the radiant 
morning, and make the day dark with night. At 
evening, having bethought ourselves, and returned 
to him that feeds the ravens, and watches the dy- 
ing sparrow, and says to his children, " Love one 
another," the sunset splendor is glad over us, the 
western sky is refulgent as the court of the Father 
when the glad news is spread abroad that a sinner 
has repented. We have mourned in the twilight 
of our little faith, but, having sent away our sin, 
the glory of God's heaven over his darkening earth 
has comforted us. 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY. 

Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted. — 
Matthew v. 4. 

Grief, then, sorrow, pain of heart, mourning, is 
no partition- wall between man and God. So far is 
it from opposing any obstacle to the passage of 
God's light into man's soul, that the Lord con- 
gratulates them that mourn. There is no evil in 
sorrow. True, it is not an essential good, a good 
in itself, like love ; but it will mingle with any good 
thing, and is even so allied to good that it will 
open the door of the heart for any good. More of 
sorrowful than of joyful men are always standing 
about the everlasting doors that open into the pres- 
ence of the Most High. It is true also that joy is 
in its nature more divine than sorrow ; for, although 
man must sorrow, and God share in his sorrow, yet 
in himself God is not sorrowful, and the *^ glad 



100 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

Creator" never made man for sorrow: it is but a 
stormy strait through which he must pass to his 
ocean of peace. He '' makes the joy the last in 
every song." Still, I repeat, a man in sorrow is in 
general far nearer God than a man in joy. Glad- 
ness may make a man forget his thanksgiving; 
misery drives him to his prayers. For we are not 
yet, we are only becoming. The endless day will 
at length dawn whose every throbbing moment 
will heave our hearts Godward; we shall scarce 
need to lift them up: now, there are two door- 
keepers to the house of prayer, and Sorrow is more 
on the alert to open than her grandson Joy. 

The gladsome child runs farther afield; the 
wounded child turns to go home. The weeper sits 
down close to the gate; the Lord of life draws 
nigh to him from within. God loves not sorrow, 
yet rejoices to see a man sorrowful, for in his sor- 
row man leaves his heavenward door on the latch, 
and God can enter to help him. He loves, I say, 
to see him sorrowful, for then he can come near to 
part him from that which makes his sorrow a wel- 
come sight. When Ephraim bemoans himself, he 
is a pleasant child. So good a medicine is sorrow, 
so powerful to slay the moths that infest and de- 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY. lOI 

vour the human heart, that the Lord is glad to see 
a man weep. He congratulates him on his sad- 
ness. Grief is an ill-favored thing, but she is 
Love's own child, and her mother loves her. 

The promise to them that mourn is not the 
kingdom of heaven, but that their mourning shall be 
ended, that they shall be comforted. To mourn is 
not to fight with evil ; it is only to miss that which 
is good. It is not an essential heavenly condition, 
like poorness of spirit or meekness. No man will 
carry his mourning with him into heaven — or, if 
he does, it will speedily be turned either into joy, 
or into what will result in joy, namely, redemptive 
action. 

Mourning is a canker-bitten blossom on the 
rose-tree of love. Is there any mourning worthy 
the name that has not love for its root? Men 
mourn because they love. Love is the life out of 
which are fashioned all the natural feelings, every 
emotion of man. Love modeled by faith is hope ; 
love shaped by wrong is anger — verily anger, 
though pure of sin ; love invaded by loss is grief. 

The garment of mourning is oftenest a winding- 
sheet ; the loss of the loved by death is the main 
cause of the mourning of the world. The Greek 



102 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

word here used to describe the blessed of the Lord 
generally means those that mourn for the dead. It 
is not in the New Testament employed exclusively 
in this sense, neither do I imagine it stands here 
for such only : there are griefs than death sorer far, 
and harder far to comfort — harder even for God 
himself, with whom all things are possible ; but it 
may give pleasure to know that the promise of 
comfort to those that mourn may specially apply 
to those that mourn because their loved have gone 
out of their sight, and beyond the reach of their 
cry. Their sorrow, indeed, to the love divine, in- 
volves no difficulty; it is a small matter, easily 
met. The father whose elder son is ever with 
him, but whose younger is in a far country, wast- 
ing his substance with riotous living, is unspeakably 
more to be pitied, and is harder to help, than that 
father both of whose sons lie in the sleep of death. 
Much of what goes by the name of comfort is 
merely worthless ; and such as could be comforted 
hy it, I should not care to comfort. Let time do 
what it may to bring the ease of obHvion; let 
change of scene do what in it lies to lead thought 
away from the vanished ; let new loves bury grief 
in the grave of the old love : consolation of such 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY, 103 

sort could never have crossed the mind of Jesus. 
Would The Truth call a man blessed because his 
pain would sooner or later depart, leaving him at 
best no better than before, and certainly poorer — 
not only the beloved gone, but the sorrow for him 
too, and with the sorrow the love that had caused 
the sorrow? Blessed of God because restored to 
an absence of sorrow? Such a God were fitly 
adored only where not one heart worshiped in spirit 
and in truth. 

" The Lord means of course," some one may 
say, " that the comfort of the mourners will be the 
restoration of that which they have lost. He means, 
* Blessed are ye although ye mourn, for your sorrow 
will be turned into joy.' " 

Happy are they whom nothing less than such 
restoration will comfort ! But would such restora- 
tion be comfort enough for the heart of Jesus to 
give ? Was ever love so deep, so pure, so perfect, 
as to be good enough for him ? And suppose the 
love between the parted two had been such, would 
the mere restoration in the future of that which 
once he had be ground enough for so emphatically 
proclaiming the man blessed now, blessed while 
yet in the midnight of his loss, and knowing noth- 



104 ^^^ HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

ing of the hour of his deliverance ? To call a man 
blessed in his sorrow because of something to be 
given him, surely implies a something better than 
what he had before ! True, the joy that is past 
may have been so great that the man might well 
feel blessed in the merest hope of its restoration ; 
but would that be meaning enough for the word in 
the mouth of the Lord? That the interruption of 
his blessedness was but temporary would hardly 
be fit ground for calling the man blessed in that 
interruption. Blessed is a strong word, and in the 
mouth of Jesus means all it can mean. Can his 
saying here mean less than, '' Blessed are they that 
mourn, for they shall be comforted with a bliss well 
worth all the pain of the medicinal sorrow " ? Be- 
sides, the benediction surely means that the man is 
blessed because of his condition of mourning, not in 
spite of it. His mourning is surely a part, at least, 
of the Lord's ground for congratulating him : is it 
not the present operative means whereby the con- 
solation is growing possible ? In a word, I do not 
think the Lord would be content to call a man 
blessed on the mere ground of his going to be re- 
stored to a former bliss by no means perfect; I 
think he congratulated the mourners upon the grief 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY, 105 

they were enduring, because he saw the excellent 
glory of the comfort that was drawing nigh ; be- 
cause he knew the immeasurably greater joy to 
which the sorrow was at once clearing the way 
and conducting the mourner. When I say greater^ 
God forbid I should mean other! I mean the same 
bliss, divinely enlarged and divinely purified — 
passed again through the hands of the creative 
Perfection. The Lord knew all the history of love 
and loss; beheld throughout the universe the 
winged Love discrowning the skeleton Fear. 
God's comfort must ever be larger than man's grief, 
else were there gaps in his Godhood. Mere res- 
toration would leave a hiatus, barren and growth- 
less, in the development of his children. 

But, alas, what a pinched hope, what miserable 
expectations, most who call themselves the Lord's 
disciples derive from their notions of his teaching ! 
Well may they think of death as the one thing to 
be right zealously avoided, and forever lamented ! 
Who would forsake even the windowless hut of his 
sorrow for the poor mean place they imagine the 
Father's house ! Why, many of them do not even 
expect to know their friends there ! do not expect 
to distinguish one from another of all the holy as- 



I06 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

sembly ! They will look in many faces, but never 
to recognize old friends and lovers ! A fine savior 
of men is their Jesus ! Glorious lights they shine 
in the world of our sorrow, holding forth a word 
of darkness, of dismalest death! Is the Lord such 
as they believe him ? '' Good-bye, then, good 
Master ! " cries the human heart. " I thought thou 
couldst save me, but, alas, thou canst not. If thou 
savest the part of our being which can sin, thou 
lettest the part that can love sink into hopeless 
perdition: thou art not he that should come; I 
look for another ! Thou wouldst destroy and not 
save me ! Thy Father is not my Father ; thy God 
is not my God ! Ah, to whom shall we go ? He 
has 7iot the words of eternal life, this Jesus, and 
the universe is dark as chaos ! O Father, this thy 
Son is good, but we need a greater Son than he. 
Never will thy children love thee under the shadow 
of this new law, that they are not to love one an- 
other as thou lovest them!" How does that man 
love God — of what kind is the love he bears him — 
who is unable to believe that God loves every 
throb of every human heart toward another ? Did 
not the Lord die that we should love one another, 
and be one with him and the Father, and is not 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY. 107 

the knowledge of difference essential to the deepest 
love? Can there be oneness without difference? 
harmony without distinction ? Are all to have the 
same face ? then why faces at all ? If the plains of 
heaven are to be crowded with the same one face 
over and over forever, but one moment will pass 
ere by monotony bliss shall have grown ghastly. 
Why not perfect spheres of featureless ivory rather 
than those multitudinous heads with one face ! Or 
are we to start afresh with countenances all new, 
each beautiful, each lovable, each a revelation of 
the infinite Father, each distinct from every other, 
and therefore all blending toward a full revealing 
— but never more the dear old precious faces, with 
its whole story in each, which seem, at the very 
thought of them, to draw our hearts out of our 
bosoms ? Were they created only to become dear, 
and be destroyed ? Is it in wine only that the old 
is better? Would such a new heaven be a thing 
to thank God for? Would this be a prospect on 
which the Son of Man would congratulate the 
mourner, or at which the mourner for the dead 
would count himself blessed? It is a shame that 
such a preposterous, monstrous unbelief should call 
for argument. 



I08 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

A heaven without human love it were inhuman, 
and yet more undivine, to desire ; it ought not to 
be desired by any being made in the image of 
God. The Lord of life died that his Father's chil- 
dren might grow perfect in love — might love their 
brothers and sisters as he loved them : is it to this 
end that they must cease to know one another? 
To annihilate the past of our earthly embodiment 
would be to crush under the heel of an iron fate 
the very idea of tenderness, human or divine. 

We shall all doubtless be changed, but in what 
direction? — to something less, or to something 
greater? — to something that is less we, which 
means degradation? to something that is not we, 
which means annihilation? or to something that is 
more we, which means a further development of 
the original idea of us, the divine germ of us, hold- 
ing in it all we ever were, all we ever can and must 
become ? What is it constitutes this or that man ? 
Is it what he himself thinks he is ? Assuredly not. 
Is it what his friends at any given moment think 
him? Far from it. In which of his changing 
moods is he more himself? Loves any lover so 
little as to desire 7io change in the person loved — 
no something different to bring him or her closer 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY, 109 

to the indwelling ideal? In the loveliest is there 
not something not like her — something less lovely 
than she — some little thing in which a change 
would make her, not less, but more herself? Is 
it not of the very essence of the Christian hope, 
that we shall be changed from much bad to all 
good ? If a wife so love that she would keep every 
opposition, every inconsistency in her husband's as 
yet but partially harmonious character, she does 
not love well enough for the kingdom of heaven. 
If its imperfections be essential to the individuality 
she loves, and to the repossession of her joy in it, 
she may be sure that, if he were restored to her as 
she would have him, she would soon come to love 
him less — perhaps to love him not at all; for no 
one who does not love perfection will ever keep 
constant in loving. Fault is not lovable; it is 
only the good in which the alien fault dwells that 
causes it to seem capable of being loved. Neither 
is it any man's peculiarities that make him beloved ; 
it is the essential humanity underlying those pe- 
culiarities. They may make him interesting, and, 
where not offensive, they may come to be loved 
for the sake of the man ; but in themselves they 
are of smallest account. 



no THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

We must not, however, confound peculiarity 
with diversity. Diversity is in and from God ; pe- 
culiarity in and from man. The real man is the 
divine idea of him; the man God had in view 
when he began to send him forth out of thought 
into thinking ; the man he is now working to per- 
fect by casting out what is not he, and developing 
what is he. But in God's real men, that is, his 
ideal men, the diversity is infinite ; he does not re- 
peat his creations ; every one of his children differs 
from every other, and in every one the diversity is 
lovable. God gives in his children an analysis of 
himself, an analysis that will never be exhausted. 
It is the original God-idea of the individual man 
that will at length be given, without spot or blem- 
ish, into the arms of love. 

Such, surely, is the heart of the comfort the Lord 
will give those whose love is now making them 
mourn ; and their present blessedness must be the 
expectation of the time when the true lover shall 
find the restored the same as the lost — with pre- 
cious differences : the things that were not like the 
true self, gone or going ; the things that were love- 
liest, lovelier still; the restored not merely more 
than the lost, but more the person lost than he or 



SORROW THE FLEDGE OF JOY. ill 

she that was lost. For the things which made him 
or her what he or she was, the things that rendered 
lovable, the things essential to the person, will be 
more present, because more developed. 

Whether or not the Lord was here thinking 
specially of the mourners for the dead, as I think 
he was, he surely does not limit the word of com- 
fort to them, or wish us to believe less than that 
his Father has perfect comfort for every human 
grief. Out upon such miserable theologians as, 
instead of receiving them into the good soil of a 
generous heart, to bring forth truth an hundred- 
fold, so cut and pare the words of the Lord as to 
take the very Hfe from them, quenching all their 
glory and color in their own inability to believe, 
and still would have the dead letter of them ac- 
cepted as the comfort of a Creator to the sore 
hearts he made in his own image ! Here, " as if 
they were God's spies," some such would tell us 
that the Lord proclaims the blessedness of those 
that mourn for their sins, and of them only. What 
mere honest man would make a promise which 
was all a reservation, except in one unmentioned 
point! Assuredly they who mourn for their sins 
will be gloriously comforted, but certainly such also 



112 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

as are bowed down with any grief. The Lord 
would have us know that sorrow is not a part of 
Hfe ; that it is but a wind blowing throughout it, to 
winnow and cleanse. Where shall the woman go 
whose child is at the point of death, or whom the 
husband of her youth has forsaken, but to her 
Father in heaven ? Must she keep away until she 
knows herself sorry for her sins ? How should that 
woman care to be delivered from her sins, how 
could she accept any comfort, who believed the 
child of her bosom lost to her forever? Would 
the Lord have such a one be of good cheer, of 
merry heart, because her sins were forgiven her? 
Would such a mother be a woman of whom the 
Saviour of men might have been born ? If a woman 
forget the child she has borne and nourished, how 
shall she remember the Father from whom she has 
herself come ? The Lord came to heal the broken- 
hearted ; therefore he said, '' Blessed are the mourn- 
ers." Hope in God, mother, for the deadest of 
thy children, even for him who died in his sins. 
Thou mayest have long to wait for him — but he 
will be found. It may be, thou thyself wilt one 
day be sent to seek him and find him. Rest thy 
hope on no excuse thy love would make for him, 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY. 1 13 

neither upon any quibble theological or sacerdotal ; 
hope on in him who created him, and who loves 
him more than thou. God will excuse him better 
than thou, and his uncovenanted mercy is larger 
than that of his ministers. Shall not the Father do 
his best to find his prodigal? the Good Shepherd 
to find his lost sheep? The angels in his presence 
know the Father, and watch for the prodigal. Thou 
shalt be comforted. 

There is one phase of our mourning for the dead 
which I must not leave unconsidered, seeing it is 
the pain within pain of all our mourning — the sor- 
row, namely, with its keen recurrent pangs, be- 
cause of things we have said or done, or omitted 
to say or do, while we companied with the de- 
parted. The very life that would give itself to 
the other aches with the sense of having, this time 
and that, not given what it might. We cast our- 
selves at their feet, crying. Forgive me, my heart's 
own! but they are pale with distance, and do not 
seem to hear. It may be that they are longing in 
like agony of love after us, but know better, or per- 
haps only are more assured than we, that we shall 
be comforted together by and by. 

Bethink thee, brother, sister, I say ; bethink thee 

8 



114 ^^-^ HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

of the splendor of God, and answer — Would he be 
perfect if in his restitution of all things there were 
no opportunity for declaring our bitter grief and 
shame for the past? no moment in which to sob, 
Sister, brother, I am thy slave ? no room for mak- 
ing amends ? At the same time, when the desired 
moment comes, one look in the eyes may be 
enough, and we shall know one another even as 
God knows us. Like the purposed words of the 
prodigal in the parable, it may be that the words 
of our confession will hardly find place. Heart 
may so speak to heart as to forget there were such 
things. Mourner, hope in God, and comfort where 
thou canst, and the Lord of mourners will be able 
to comfort thee the sooner. It may be thy very 
severity with thyself has already moved the Lord 
to take thy part. 

Such as mourn the loss of love, such from whom 
the friend, the brother, the lover, has turned away 
— what shall I cry to them? — You too shall be 
comforted — only hearken: Whatever selfishness 
clouds the love that mourns the loss of love, that 
selfishness must be taken out of it — burned out of 
it even by pain extreme, if such be needful. By 
cause of that in thy love which was not love, it 



SORROW THE PLEDGE OF JOY. II5 

may be thy loss has come ; anyhow, because of 
thy love's defect, thou must suffer that it may be 
suppHed. God will not, like the unjust judge, 
avenge thee to escape the cry that troubles him. 
No crying will make him comfort thy selfishness. 
He will not render thee incapable of loving truly. 
He despises neither thy love, though mingled with 
selfishness, nor thy suffering that springs from 
both ; he will disentangle thy selfishness from thy 
love, and cast it into the fire. His cure for thy 
selfishness at once and thy suffering is to make 
thee love more — and more truly ; not with the 
love of love, but with the love of the person whose 
lost love thou bemoanest. For the love of love is 
the love of thyself. Begin to love as God loves, 
and thy grief will assuage; but for comfort wait 
his time. What he will do for thee, he only knows. 
It may be thou wilt never know what he will do, 
but only what he has done: it was too good for 
thee to know save by receiving it. The moment 
thou art capable of it, thine it will be. 

One thing is clear in regard to every trouble — 
that the natural way with it is straight to the 
Father's knee. The Father is father for his chil- 
dren, else why did he make himself their father? 



Il6 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

Wouldst thou not, mourner, be comforted rather 
after the one eternal fashion — the child by the 
father — than in such poor temporary way as would 
but leave thee the more exposed to thy worst 
enemy, thine own unreclaimed self? — an enemy 
who has but this one good thing in him — that he 
will always bring thee to sorrow ! 

The Lord has come to wipe away our tears. He 
is doing it ; he will have it done as soon as he can ; 
and until he can, he would have them flow without 
bitterness ; to which end he tells us it is a blessed 
thing to mourn, because of the comfort on its way. 
Accept his comfort now, and so prepare for the 
comfort at hand. He is getting you ready for it, 
but you must be a fellow-worker with him, or he 
will never have done. He must have you pure in 
heart, eager after righteousness, a very child of his 
Father in heaven. 



GOD'S FAMILY. 

Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God. Blessed 
are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they 
shall be filled. Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be 
called the children of God. — Matthew v. 8, 6, 9, 

The cry of the deepest in man has always been, 
to see God. It was the cry of Moses and the cry 
of Job, the cry of psalmist and of prophet ; and to 
the cry there has ever been faintly heard a far ap- 
proach of coming answer. In the fullness of time 
the Son appears with the proclamation that a cer- 
tain class of men shall behold the Father : *' Blessed 
are the pure in heart," he cries, ** for they shall see 
God." He who saw God, who sees him now, who 
always did and always will see him, says, '* Be 
pure, and you also shall see him." To see God 
was the Lord's own, eternal, one happiness ; there- 
fore he knew that the essential bliss of the creat- 
ure is to behold the face of the Creator. In that 



Il8 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

face lies the mystery of a man's own nature, the 
history of a man's own being. He who can read 
no line of it can know neither himself nor his fel- 
low; he only who knows God a little can at all 
understand man. The blessed in Dante's Paradise 
ever and always read each other's thoughts in God. 
Looking to him, they find their neighbor. All 
that the creature needs to see or know, all that the 
creature can see or know, is the face of him from 
whom he came. Not seeing and knowing it, he 
will never be at rest ; seeing and knowing it, his 
existence will yet indeed be a mystery to him and 
an awe, but no more a dismay. To know that it 
is, and that it has power neither to continue nor to 
cease, must, to any soul alive enough to appreciate 
the fact, be merest terror, save also it knows one 
with it the Power by which it exists. From the 
man who comes to know and feel that Power in 
him and one with him, loneliness, anxiety, and fear 
vanish ; he is no more an orphan without a home, 
a little one astray on the cold waste of a helpless 
consciousness. '' Father," he cries, '* hold me fast 
to thy creating will, that I may know myself one 
with it, know myself its outcome, its willed em- 
bodiment, and rejoice without trembling. Be this 



GOD*S FAMILY, II9 

the delight of my being, that thou hast wilkd, hast 
loved me forth ; let me know that I am thy child, 
born to obey thee. Dost thou not justify thy deed 
to thyself by thy tenderness toward me ? dost thou 
not justify it to thy child by revealing to him his 
claim on thee because of thy disparture of him from 
thyself, because of his utter dependence on thee? 
Father, thou art in me, else I could not be in thee, 
could have no house for my soul to dwell in, or any 
world in which to walk abroad." 

These truths are, I believe, the very necessities 
of fact, but a man does not therefore, at a given 
moment, necessarily know them. It is absolutely 
necessary, none the less, to his real being, that he 
should know these spiritual relations in which he 
stands to his Origin ; yea, that they should be al- 
ways present and potent with him, and become the 
heart and sphere and all-pervading substance of his 
consciousness, of which they are the ground and 
foundation. Once to have seen them is not always 
to see them. There are times, and those times 
many, when the cares of this world — with no right 
to any part in our thought, seeing either they are 
unreasonable or God imperfect — so blind the eyes 
of the soul to the radiance of the eternally true, 



I20 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

that they see it only as if it ought to be true, not 
as if it must be true ; as if it might be true in the 
region of thought, but could not be true in the 
region of fact. Our very senses, filled with the 
things of our passing sojourn, combine to cast dis- 
credit upon the existence of any world for the sake 
of which we are furnished with an inner eye, an 
eternal ear. But had we once seen God face to 
face, should we not be always and forever sure of 
him? we have had but glimpses of the Father. 
Yet, if we had seen God face to face, but had again 
become impure of heart — if such a fearful thought 
be a possible idea — we should then no more be- 
Heve that we had ever beheld him. A sin-be- 
clouded soul could never recall the vision whose 
essential verity was its only possible proof. None 
but the pure in heart see God ; only the growing- 
pure hope to see him. Even those who saw the 
Lord, the express image of his person, did not see 
God. They only saw Jesus— and then but the 
outside Jesus, or a little more. They were not pure 
in heart ; they saw him and did not see him. They 
saw him with their eyes, but not with those eyes 
which alone can see God. Those were not born in 
them yet. Neither the eyes of the resurrection- 



GOD'S FAMILY, 121 

body, nor the eyes of unembodied spirits can see 
God ; only the eyes of that eternal something that 
is of the very essence of God, the thought- eyes, 
the truth-eyes, the love-eyes, can see him. It is 
not because we are created and he uncreated, it is 
not because of any difference involved in that dif- 
ference of all differences, that we cannot see him. 
If he pleased to take a shape, and that shape were 
presented to us, and we saw that shape, we should 
not therefore be seeing God. Even if we knew it 
was a shape of God — call it even God himself our 
eyes rested upon; if we had been told the fact 
and believed the report ; yet, if we did not see the 
GodnesSy were not capable of recognizing him, so 
as without the report to know the vision him, we 
should not be seeing God, we should only be see- 
ing the tabernacle in which for the moment he 
dwelt. In other words, not seeing what in the form 
made it a form fit for him to take, we should not 
be seeing a presence which could only be God. 

To see God is to stand on the highest point of 
created being. Not until we see God — no partial 
and passing embodiment of him, but the abiding 
presence — do we stand upon our own mountain- 
top, the height of the existence God has given us, 



122 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

and up to which he is leading us. That there we 
should stand, is the end of our creation. This truth 
is at the heart of everything, means all kinds of 
completions, may be uttered in many ways; but 
language will never compass it, for form will never 
contain it. Nor shall we ever see, that is, know, 
God perfectly. We shall indeed never absolutely 
know man or woman or child ; but we may know 
God as we never can know human being — as we 
never can know ourselves. We not only may, but 
we must so know him, and it can never be until 
we are pure in heart. Then shall we know him 
with the infinitude of an ever-growing knowledge. 

'' What is it, then, to be pure in heart? " 

I answer. It is not necessary to define this purity, 
or to have in the mind any clear form of it. For 
even to know perfectly, were that possible, what 
purity of heart is, would not be to be pure in heart. 

"How then am I to try after it? can I do so 
without knowing what it is? " 

Though you do not know any definition of 
purity, you know enough to begin to be pure. You 
do not know what a man is, but you know how to 
make his acquaintance — perhaps even how to gain 
his friendship. Your brain does not know what 



GOD'S FAMILY. 1 23 

purity is ; your heart has some acquaintance with 
purity itself. Your brain is seeking to know what 
it is, may even obstruct your heart in bettering its 
friendship with it. To know what purity is, a man 
must aheady be pure; but he who can put the 
question aheady knows enough of purity, I re- 
peat, to begin to become pure. If this moment 
you determine to start for purity, your conscience 
will at once tell you where to begin. If you re- 
ply, " My conscience says nothing definite," I an- 
swer, '' You are but playing with your conscience. 
Determine, and it will speak." 

If you care to see God, be pure. If you will 
not be pure, you will grow more and more impure ; 
and instead of seeing God, will at length find your- 
self face to face with a vast inane — a vast inane, 
yet filled full of one inhabitant, that devouring 
monster, your own false self. If for this neither 
do you care, I tell you there is a Power that will 
not have it so ; a Love that will make you care by 
the consequences of not caring. 

You who seek purity, and would have your fel- 
low-men also seek it, spend not your labor on the 
stony ground of their intellect, endeavoring to ex- 
plain what purity is ; give their imagination the one 



124 ^^^ HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

pure man; call up their conscience to witness 
against their own deeds; urge upon them the 
grand resolve to be pure. With the first endeavor 
of a soul toward her, Purity will begin to draw 
nigh, calling for admittance ; and never will a man 
have to pause in the divine toil, asking what next 
is required of him ; the demands of the indwelling 
Purity will ever be in front of his slow-laboring 
obedience. 

If one should say, ''Alas, I am shut out from 
this blessing ! I am not pure in heart : never shall 
I see God!" here is another word from the same 
eternal heart to comfort him, making his grief its 
own consolation. For this man also there is bless- 
ing with the messenger of the Father. Unhappy 
men were we, if God were the God of the per- 
fected only, and not of the growing, the becom- 
ing! ''Blessed are they," says the Lord, con- 
cerning the not yet pure, " which do hunger and 
thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled." 
Filled with righteousness, they are pure; pure, 
they shall see God. 

Long ere the Lord appeared, ever since man was 
on the earth, nay, surely, from the very beginning, 
was his Spirit at work in it for righteousness; in 



GOD'S FAMILY, 12$ 

the fullness of time he came in his own human per- 
son, to fulfill all righteousness. He came to his 
own of the same mind with himself, who hungered 
and thirsted after righteousness. They should be 
fulfilled of righteousness ! 

To hunger and thirst after anything implies a 
sore personal need, a strong desire, a passion for 
that thing. Those that hunger and thirst after 
righteousness seek with their whole nature the de- 
sign of that nature. Nothing less will give them 
satisfaction ; that alone will set them at ease. They 
long to be delivered from their sins, to send them 
away, to be clean and blessed by their absence — in 
a word, to become men, God's men ; for, sin gone, 
all the rest is good. It was not in such hearts, it 
was not in any heart that the revolting legal fiction 
of imputed righteousness arose. Righteousness 
itself, God's righteousness, rightness in their own 
being, in heart and brain and hands, is what they 
desire. Of such men was Nathanael, in whom was 
no guile; such, perhaps, was Nicodemus too, al- 
though he did come to Jesus by night ; such was 
Zacchaeus. The temple could do nothing to deliver 
them; but, by their very futility, its observances 
had done their work, developing the desires they 



126 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

could not meet, making the men hunger and thirst 
the more after genuine righteousness: the Lord 
must bring them this bread from heaven. With 
him, the live, original rightness, in their hearts, they 
must speedily become righteous. With that Love 
their friend, who is at once both the root and the 
flower of things, they would strive vigorously as 
well as hunger eagerly after righteousness. Love 
is the father of righteousness. It could not be, and 
could not be hungered after, but for love. The 
lord of righteousness himself could not live with- 
out Love, without the Father in him. Every 
heart was created for, and can live no otherwise 
than in and upon love eternal, perfect, pure, un- 
changing ; and love necessitates righteousness. In 
how many souls has not the very thought of a real 
God waked a longing to be different, to be pure, 
to be right! The fact that this feeling is possible, 
that a soul can become dissatisfied with itself, and 
desire a change in itself, reveals God as an essen- 
tial part of its being ; for in itself the soul is aware 
that it cannot be what it would, what it ought — 
that it cannot set itself right: a need has been 
generated in the soul for which the soul can gen- 
erate no supply ; a presence higher than itself must 



GOD'S FAMILY, \2*] 

have caused that need ; a power greater than itself 
must supply it, for the soul knows its very need, 
its very lack, is of something greater than itself. 

But the primal need of the human soul is yet 
greater than this ; the longing after righteousness 
is only one of the manifestations of it; the need 
itself is that of existence not self-existent for the 
consciousness of the presence of the causing Self- 
existent. It is the man's need of God. A moral, 
that is, a human, a spiritual being, must either be 
God, or one with God. This truth begins to re- 
veal itself when the man begins to feel that he can- 
not cast out the thing he hates, cannot be the thing 
he loves. That he hates thus, that he loves thus, 
is because God is in him, but he finds he has not 
enough of God. His awakening strength mani- 
fests itself in his sense of weakness, for only 
strength can know itself weak. The negative can- 
not know itself at all. Weakness cannot know 
itself weak. It is a little strength that longs for 
more ; it is infant righteousness that hungers after 
righteousness. 

To every soul dissatisfied with itself comes this 
word, at once rousing and consoling, from the 
Power that lives and makes him live — that in his 



128 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for he shall 
be filled. His hungering and thirsting is the di- 
vine pledge of the divine meal. The more he hun- 
gers and thirsts, the more blessed is he ; the more 
room is there in him to receive that which God is 
yet more eager to give than he to have. It is the 
miserable emptiness that makes a man hunger and 
thirst; and as the body, so the soul hungers after 
what belongs to its nature. A man hungers and 
thirsts after righteousness because his nature needs 
it — needs it because it was made for it ; his soul 
desires its own. His nature is good, and desires 
more good. Therefore, that he is empty of good 
needs discourage no one; for what is emptiness 
but room to be filled ? Emptiness is need of good ; 
the emptiness that desires good is itself good. 
Even if the hunger after righteousness should in 
part spring from a desire after self-respect, it is not 
therefore all false. A man could not even be 
ashamed of himself, without some " feeling sense " 
of the beauty of rightness. By divine degrees the 
man will at length grow sick of himself, and desire 
righteousness with a pure hunger — ^just as a man 
longs to eat that which is good, nor thinks of the 
strength it will restore. 



GOD'S FAMILY. 1 29 

To be filled with righteousness will be to forget 
even righteousness itself in the bliss of being right- 
eous, that is, a child of God. The thought of 
righteousness will vanish in the fact of righteous- 
ness. When a creature is just what he is meant to 
be, what only he is fit to be; when, therefore, he 
is truly himself, he never thinks what he is. He is 
that thing ; why think about it ? It is no longer out- 
side of him that he should contemplate or desire it. 

God made man, and woke in him the hunger for 
righteousness ; the Lord came to enlarge and rouse 
this hunger. The first and lasting effect of his 
words must be to make the hungering and thirsting 
long yet more. If their passion grow to a despair- 
ing sense of the unattainable, a hopelessness of 
ever gaining that without which life were worth- 
less, let them remember that the Lord congratu- 
lates the hungry and thirsty, so sure does he know 
them of being one day satisfied. Their hunger is 
a precious thing to have, none the less that it were 
a bad thing to retain unappeased. It springs from 
the lack but also from the love of good, and its 
presence makes it possible to supply the lack. 
Happy, then, ye pining souls! The food you 
would have is the one thing the Lord would have 



I30 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

you have, the very thing he came to bring you ! 
Fear not, ye hungering and thirsting; you shall 
have righteousness enough, though none to spare 
—none to spare, yet enough to overflow upon 
every man. See how the Lord goes on filling his 
disciples, John and Peter and James and Paul, with 
righteousness from within ! What honest soul, in- 
terpreting the servant by the master, and unbiassed 
by the tradition of them that would shut the king- 
dom of heaven against men, can doubt what Paul 
means by " the righteousness which is of God by 
faith"? He was taught of Jesus Christ through 
the words he had spoken ; and the man who does 
not understand Jesus Christ will never understand 
his apostles. What righteousness could St. Paul 
have meant but the same the Lord would have 
men hunger and thirst after — the very righteous- 
ness wherewith God is righteous ! They that hun- 
ger and thirst after such only righteousness shall 
become pure in heart, and shall see God. 

If your hunger seems long in being filled, it is 
well it should seem long. But what if your right- 
eousness tarry because your hunger after it is not 
eager? There are who sit long at the table be- 
cause their desire is slow ; they eat as who should 



GOD'S FAMILY. I31 

say, We need no food. In things spiritual, in- 
creasing desire is the sign that satisfaction is draw- 
ing nearer. But it were better to hunger after 
righteousness forever than to dull the sense of lack 
with the husks of the Christian scribes and law- 
yers : he who trusts in the atonement instead of 
in the Father of Jesus Christ fills his fancy with 
the chimeras of a vulgar legalism, not his heart 
with the righteousness of God. 

Hear another like word of the Lord. He assures 
us that the Father hears the cries of his elect — of 
those whom he seeks to worship him because they 
worship in spirit and in truth. " Shall not God 
avenge his own elect," he says, " which cry day 
and night unto him? " Now what can God's elect 
have to keep on crying for, night and day, but 
righteousness ? He allows that God seems to put 
off answering them, but assures us he will answer 
them speedily. Even now he must be busy an- 
swering their prayers; increasing hunger is the 
best possible indication that he is doing so. For 
some divine reason it is well they should not yet 
know in themselves that he is answering their pray- 
ers; but the day must come when we shall be 
righteous even as he is righteous ; when no word 



132 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

of his will miss being understood because of our 
lack of righteousness; when no unrighteousness 
shall hide from our eyes the face of the Father. 

These two promises, of seeing God and being 
filled with righteousness, have place between the 
individual man and his Father in heaven directly ; 
the promise I now come to has place between a 
man and his God as the God of other men also, as 
the Father of the whole family in heaven and earth : 
" Blessed are the peace-makers, for they shall be 
called the children of God." 

Those that are on their way to see God, those 
who are growing pure in heart through hunger 
and thirst after righteousness, are indeed the chil- 
dren of God ; but specially the Lord calls those his 
children who, on their way home, are peace-makers 
in the traveling company; for, surely, those in 
any family are specially the children, who make 
peace with and among the rest. The true idea of 
the universe is the whole family in heaven and 
earth. All the children in this part of it, the earth, 
at least, are not good children ; but however far, 
therefore, the earth is from being a true portion of a 
real family, the life- germ at the root of the world, 
that by and for which it exists, is its relation to 



GOD'S FAMILY, 1 33 

God the Father of men. For the development of 
this germ in the consciousness of the children, the 
Church — whose idea is the purer family within the 
more mixed, ever growing as leaven within the 
meal by absorption, but which itself is, alas ! not 
easily distinguishable from the world it would 
change — is one of the passing means. For the 
same purpose, the whole divine family is made up 
of numberless human families, that in these, men 
may learn and begin to love one another. God, 
then, would make of the world a true, divine 
family. Now the primary necessity to the very 
existence of a family is peace. Many a human 
family is no family, and the world is no family yet, 
for the lack of peace. Wherever peace is growing, 
there, of course, is the live peace, counteracting dis- 
ruption and disintegration, and helping the develop- 
ment of the true essential family. The one ques- 
tion, therefore, as to any family is, whether peace 
or strife be on the increase in it ; for peace alone 
makes it possible for the binding grass-roots of life 
— love, namely, and justice — to spread throughout 
what were else but a wind-blown heap of still drift- 
ing sand. The peace- makers quiet the winds of 
the world ever ready to be up and blowing ; they 



134 "THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

tend and cherish the interlacing roots of the minis- 
tering grass; they spin and twist many uniting 
cords, and they weave many supporting bands; 
they are the servants, for the truth's sake, of the 
individual, of the family, of the world, of the great 
universal family of heaven and earth. They are 
the true children of that family, the allies and 
ministers of every clasping and consolidating force 
in it; fellow- workers they are with God in the 
creation of the family ; they help him to get it to 
his mind, to perfect his father-idea. Ever radiat- 
ing peace, they welcome love, but do not seek it ; 
they provoke no jealousy. They are the children 
of God, for, like him, they would be one with his 
creatures. His eldest Son, his very likeness, was 
the first of the family peace-makers. Preaching 
peace to them that were afar off and them that 
were nigh, he stood undefended in the turbulent 
crowd of his fellows, and it was only over his dead 
body that his brothers began to come together in 
the peace that will not be broken. He rose again 
from the dead; his peace-making brothers, like 
himself, are dying unto sin ; and not yet have the 
evil children made their Father hate, or their elder 
Brother flinch. 



GOD'S FAMILY. 1 35 

On the other hand, those whose influence is to 
divide and separate, causing the hearts of men to 
lean away from each other, make themselves the 
children of the evil one : born of God and not of 
the devil, they turn from God, and adopt the devil 
their father. They set their God-born life against 
God, against the whole creative, redemptive pur- 
pose of his unifying will, ever obstructing the one 
prayer of the First-born — that the children may be 
one with him in the Father. Against the heart-' 
end of creation, against that for which the Son 
yielded himself utterly, the sowers of strife, the 
fomenters of discord, contend ceaseless. They do 
their part with all the other powers of evil to make 
the world which the love of God holds together^ — 
a world at least, though not yet a family — one 
heaving mass of dissolution. But they labor in 
vain. Through the mass and through it, that it 
may cohere, this way and that, guided in dance 
inexplicable of prophetic harmony, move the chil- 
dren of God, the lights of the world, the lovers of 
men, the fellow- workers with God, the peace- 
makers — ever weaving, after a pattern devised by 
and known only to him who orders their ways, the 
web of the world's history. But for them the 



136 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

world would have no history; it would vanish, a 
cloud of wind-borne dust. As in his labor, so shall 
these share in the joy of God, in the divine fruition 
of victorious endeavor. '' Blessed are the peace- 
makers, for they shall be called the children of 
God " — the children because they set the Father 
on the throne of the Family. 

The main practical difficulty, with some at least 
of the peace- makers, is, how to carry themselves 
toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of 
souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not 
those powers of the Church visible who care for 
canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the 
Church more than for Christ ; who take uniformity 
for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a 
camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of ; such 
men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor 
the most potent force working for the disintegra- 
tion of the body of Christ. I imagine also that 
neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes 
to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly 
false as they are to their opponents, to whom they 
seem to have no desire to be honest and fair. I 
think, rather, they must be the babbling liars of 
the social circle, and the faithless brothers and un- 



GOD'S FAMILY, 1 37 

loving sisters of disunited human families. But 
why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of 
self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or 
grotesque, is a separating and scattering force. 
And these forces are multitudinous, these points of 
radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the 
prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and 
feel important. If such cannot hope to attract the 
attention of the great-little world, if they cannot 
even become "the cynosure of neighboring eyes," 
they will, in what sphere they may call their own, 
however small it be, try to make a party for them- 
selves ; each, revolving on his or her own axis, will 
attempt to self- center a private whirlpool of human 
monads. To draw such a surrounding, the parti- 
san of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most 
precious of bonds, poison whole broods of infant 
loves. Such real schismatics go about, where not 
inventing evil, yet rejoicing in iniquity ; mishearing ; 
misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating 
hearts. Their chosen calling is that of the strife- 
maker, the child of the dividing devil. They be- 
long to the class of the perfidious y whom Dante 
places in the lowest infernal gulf as their proper 
home. Many a woman who now imagines herself 



138 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

Standing well in morals and religion will find her- 
self at last just such a child of the devil ; and her 
misery will be the hope of her redemption. 

But it is not for her sake that I write these 
things: would such a woman recognize her ov/n 
likeness, were I to set it down as close as words 
could draw it? I am rather as one groping after 
some light on the true behavior toward her kind. 
Are we to treat persons known for liars and strife- 
makers as the children of the devil or not? Are 
we to turn away from them, and refuse to acknowl- 
edge them, rousing an ignorant strife of tongues 
concerning our conduct? Are we guilty of con- 
nivance, when silent as to the ambush whence we 
know the wicked arrow privily shot? Are we to 
call the traitor to account ? or are we to give warn- 
ing of any sort ? I have no answer. Each must 
carry the question that perplexes to the Light of 
the World. To what purpose is the Spirit of God 
promised to them that ask it, if not to help them 
order their way aright ? 

One thing is plain — that we must love the strife- 
maker ; another is nearly as plain — that, if we do 
not love him, we must leave him alone ; for v/ith- 
out love there can be no peace-making, and words 



GOD'S FAMILY, 1 39 

will but occasion more strife. To be kind neither 
hurts nor compromises. Kindness has many phases, 
and the fitting form of it may avoid offense, and 
must avoid untruth. 

We must not fear what man can do to us, but 
commit our way to the Father of the Family. We 
must be nowise anxious to defend ourselves ; and 
if not ourselves because God is our defense, then 
why our friends? is he not their defense as much 
as ours? Commit thy friend's cause also to him 
who judgeth righteously. Be ready to bear testi- 
mony for thy friend, as thou wouldst to receive 
the blow struck at him ; but do not plunge into a 
nest of scorpions to rescue his handkerchief. Be 
true to him thyself, nor spare to show thou lovest 
and honorest him; but defense may dishonor: 
men may say, What ! is thy friend's esteem, then, 
so small ? He is unwise who drags a rich veil from 
a cactus bush. 

Whatever our relation, then, with any peace- 
breaker, our mercy must ever be within call ; and 
it may help us against an indignation too strong to 
be pure, to remember that when any man is reviled 
for righteousness* sake, then is he blessed. 



THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE. 

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed 
are they which are persecuted for righteousness' sake, for theirs is 
the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye when men shall revile 
you and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you 
falsely, for my sake. Rejoice and be exceeding glad, for great is 
your reward in heaven ; for so persecuted they the prophets which 
were before you. — Matthew v. 7, 10, 11, 12. 

Mercy cannot get in where mercy goes not out. 
The outgoing makes way for the incoming. God 
takes the part of humanity against the man. The 
man must treat men as he would have God treat 
him. " If ye forgive men their trespasses," the 
Lord says, "your heavenly Father will also for- 
give you ; but if ye forgive not men their tres- 
passes, neither will your Father forgive your tres- 
passes." And in the prophecy of the judgment of 
the Son of Man, he represents himself as saying, 
" Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the 
least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto 
me." 



THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE. I4I 

But the demand for mercy is far from being for 
the sake only of the man who needs his neighbor's 
mercy ; it is greatly more for the sake of the man 
who must show the mercy. It is a small thing to 
a man whether or not his neighbor be merciful to 
him ; it is life or death to him whether or not he 
be merciful to his neighbor. The greatest mercy 
that can be shown to man is to make him merci- 
ful ; therefore, if he will not be merciful, the mercy 
of God must compel him thereto. In the parable 
of the king taking account of his servants, he de- 
livers the unmerciful debtor to the tormentors, ^* till 
he should pay all that was due unto him." The 
king had forgiven his debtor, but as the debtor re- 
fuses to pass on the forgiveness to his neighbor — 
the only way to make a return in kind — the king 
withdraws his forgiveness. If we forgive not men 
their trespasses, our trespasses remain. For how 
can God in any sense forgive, remit, or send away 
the sin which a man insists on retaining ? Unmer- 
ciful, we must be given up to the tormentors until 
we learn to be merciful. God is merciful: we 
must be merciful. There is no blessedness except 
in being such as God ; it would be altogether un- 
merciful to leave us unmerciful. The reward of 



142 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

the merciful is, that by their mercy they are ren- 
dered capable of receiving the mercy of God — yea, 
God himself, who is Mercy. 

That men may be drawn to taste and see and 
understand, the Lord associates reward with right- 
eousness. The Lord would have men love right- 
eousness, but how are they to love it without 
being acquainted with it? How are they to go 
on loving it without a growing knowledge of it? 
To draw them toward it that they may begin to 
know it, and to encourage them when assailed by 
the disappointments that accompany endeavor, he 
tells them simply a truth concerning it — that in 
the doing of it there is great reward. Let no one 
start with dismay at the idea of a reward of right- 
eousness, saying virtue is its own reward. Is not 
virtue then a reward? Is any other imaginable re- 
ward worth mentioning beside it ? True, the man 
may, after this mode or that, mistake the reward 
promised ; not the less must he have it, or perish. 
Who will count himself deceived by overfulfill- 
ment ? Would a parent be deceiving his child in 
saying, " My boy, you will have a great reward if 
you learn Greek," foreseeing his son's delight in 
Homer and Plato — now but a valueless waste in 



THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE. 1 43 

his eyes ? When his reward comes, will the youth 
feel aggrieved that it is Greek, and not bank-notes ? 
The nature indeed of the Lord's promised re- 
wards is hardly to be mistaken; yet the foolish 
remarks one sometimes hears make me wish to 
point out that neither is the Lord proclaiming an 
ethical system, nor does he make the blunder of 
representing as righteousness the doing of a good 
thing because of some advantage to be thereby 
gained. When he promises, he only states some 
fact that will encourage his disciples — that is, all 
who learn of him — to meet the difficulties in the 
way of doing right and so learning righteousness, 
his object being to make men righteous, not to 
teach them philosophy. I doubt if those who 
would, on the ground of mentioned reward, set 
aside the teaching of the Lord, are as anxious to 
be righteous as they are to prove him unrighteous. 
If they were, they would, I think, take more care 
to represent him truly ; they would make further 
search into the thing, nor be willing that he whom 
the world confesses its best man, and whom they 
themselves, perhaps, confess their superior in con- 
duct, should be found less pure in theory than 
they. Must the Lord hide from his friends that 



144 ^^^ HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

they will have cause to rejoice that they have been 
obedient ? Must he give them no help to counter- 
balance the load with which they start on their 
race ? Is he to tell them the horrors of the perse- 
cutions that await them, and not the sweet sympa- 
thies that will help them through? Was it wrong 
to assure them that where he was going they 
should go also? The Lord could not demand of 
them more righteousness than he does : " Be ye 
therefore perfect as your Father in heaven is per- 
fect;" but not to help them by word of love, deed 
of power, and promise of good, would have shown 
him far less of a brother and a savior. It is the 
part of the enemy of righteousness to increase the 
difficulties in the way of becoming righteous, and 
to diminish those in the way of seeming righteous. 
Jesus desires no righteousness for the pride of be- 
ing righteous, any more than for advantage to be 
gained by it ; therefore, while requiring such purity 
as the man, beforehand, is unable to imagine, he 
gives him all the encouragement he can. He will 
not enhance his victory by difficulties — of them 
there are enough — but by completeness. He will 
not demand the loftiest motives in the yet far from 
loftiest soul: to those the soul must grow. He 



THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE. 1 45 

will hearten the child with promises, and fulfill 
them to the contentment of the man. 

Men cannot be righteous without love ; to love 
a righteous man is the best, the only way to learn 
righteousness : the Lord gives us himself to love, 
and promises his closest friendship to them that 
overcome. 

God's rewards are always in kind. " I am your 
Father; be my children, and I will be your 
Father." Every obedience is the opening of an- 
other door into the boundless universe of life. So 
long as the constitution of that universe remains, so 
long as the world continues to be made by God, 
righteousness can never fail of perfect reward. Be- 
fore it could be otherwise, the government must 
have passed into other hands. 

The idea of merit is nowise essential to that of 

reward. Jesus tells us that the lord who finds his 

servant faithful will make him sit down to meat, 

and come forth and serve him ; he says likewise, 

" When ye have done all, say we are unprofitable 

servants ; we have done only that which it was our 

duty to do." Reward is the rebound of Virtue's 

well-served ball from the hand of Love ; a sense 

of merit is the most sneaking shape that self-satis- 
10 



146 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

faction can assume. God's reward lies closed in 
all well-doing : the doer of right grows better and 
humbler, and comes nearer to God's heart as nearer 
to his likeness ; grows more capable of God's own 
blessedness, and of inheriting the kingdoms of 
heaven and earth. To be made greater than one's 
fellows is the offered reward of hell, and involves 
no greatness; to be made greater than one's self 
is the divine reward, and involves a real greatness. 
A man might be set above all his fellows, to be but 
so much less than he was before ; a man cannot be 
raised a hair's-breadth above himself without rising 
nearer to God. The reward itself, then, is right- 
eousness ; and the man who was righteous for the 
sake of such reward, knowing what it was, would 
be righteous for the sake of righteousness, — which 
yet, however, would not be perfection. But I 
must distinguish and divide no further now. 

The reward of mercy is not often of this world ; 
the merciful do not often receive mercy in return 
from their fellows ; perhaps they do not often re- 
ceive much gratitude. None the less, being the 
children of their Father in heaven, will they go on 
to show mercy, even to their enemies. They must 
give like God, and like God be blessed in giving. 



THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE. 1 47 

There is a mercy that lies in the endeavor to 
share with others the best things God has given : 
they who do so will be persecuted and reviled and 
slandered, as well as thanked and loved and be- 
friended. The Lord not only promises the great- 
est possible reward ; he tells his disciples the worst 
they have to expect. He not only shows them the 
fair countries to which they are bound; he tells 
them the truth of the rough weather and the hard- 
ships of the way. He will not have them choose 
in ignorance. At the same time he strengthens 
them to meet coming difficulty by instructing them 
in its real nature. All this is part of his prepara- 
tion of them for his work, for taking his yoke upon 
them, and becoming fellow-laborers with him in his 
Father's vineyard. They must not imagine, be- 
cause they are the servants o( his Father, that 
therefore they shall find their work easy; they 
shall only find the reward great. Neither will he 
have them fancy, when evil comes upon them, that 
something unforeseen, unprovided for, has befallen 
them. It is just then, on the contrary, that their 
reward comes nigh: when men revile them and 
persecute them, then they may know that they are 
blessed. Their suffering is ground for rejoicing. 



148 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

for exceeding gladness. The ignominy cast upon 
them leaves the name of the Lord's Father written 
upon their foreheads, the mark of the true among 
the false, of the children among the slaves. With 
all who suffer for the world, persecution is the seal 
of their patent, a sign that they were sent : they 
fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of 
Christ for his body's sake. 

Let us look at the similar words the Lord spoke 
in a later address to his disciples, in the presence 
of thousands, on the plain, — supplemented with 
lamentation over such as have what they desire : 
St. Luke vi. 20-26. 

^'Blessed be ye poor, for yours is the kingdom of 
God. Blessed are ye that hunger now, for ye shall 
be filled. Blessed are ye that weep now, for ye 
shall laugh. Blessed are ye when men shall hate 
you, and when they shall separate you from their 
company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your 
name as evil, for the Son of Man's sake. Rejoice 
ye in that day, and leap for joy , for behold your re- 
ward is great in heaven; for in the like mamier 
did their fathers unto the prophets. 

''But woe unto you that are rich / for ye have 
received your consolation. Woe unto you that are 



THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE. 1 49 

full, for ye shall hunger. Woe unto you that laugh 
noWy for ye shall mourn and weep. Woe unto you 
when all men shall speak well of you; for so did 
their fathers to the false prophets'^ 

On this occasion he uses the word hunger with- 
out limitation. Every true want, every genuine 
need, every God-created hunger, is a thing pro- 
vided for in the idea of the universe ; but no at- 
tempt to fill a void otherwise than the Heart of the 
Universe intended and intends, is or can be any- 
thing but a woe. God forgets none of his children 
— the naughty ones any more than the good. 
Love and reward are for the good : love and cor- 
rection for the bad. The bad ones will trouble the 
good, but shall do them no hurt. The evil a man 
does to his neighbor shall do his neighbor no harm, 
shall work indeed for his good; but he himself 
will have to mourn for his doing. A sore injury to 
himself, it is to his neighbor a cause of jubilation 
— not for the evil the man does to himself — over 
that there is sorrow in heaven — but for the good it 
occasions his neighbor. The poor, the hungry, the 
weeping, the hated, may lament their lot as if God 
had forgotten them ; but God is all the time caring 
for them. Blessed in his sight now, they shall soon 



I50 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

know themselves blessed. " Blessed are ye that 
weep now, for ye shall laugh." Welcome words 
from the glad heart of the Saviour! Do they not 
make our hearts burn within us? — ^They shall be 
comforted even to laughter ! The poor, the hun- 
gry, the weeping, the hated, the persecuted, are 
the powerful, the opulent, the merry, the loved, the 
victorious of God's kingdom, — to be filled with 
good things, to laugh for very delight, to be hon- 
ored and sought and cherished ! 

But such as have their poor consolation in this 
life — alas for them! — for those who have yet to 
learn what hunger is I for those whose laughter is 
as the crackling of thorns! for those who have 
loved and gathered the praises of men! for the 
rich, the jocund, the full-fed ! Silent-footed evil is 
on its way to seize them. Dives must go without ; 
Lazarus must have. God's education makes use 
of terrible extremes. There are last that shall be 
first, and first that shall be last. 

The Lord knew what trials, what tortures even, 
awaited his disciples after his death ; he knew they 
would need every encouragement he could give 
them to keep their hearts strong, lest in some mo- 
ment of dismay they should deny him. If they 



THE REWARD OF OBEDIENCE. 151 

had denied him, where would our gospel be ? If 
there are none able and ready to be crucified for 
him now, alas for the age to come ! What a poor 
travesty of the good news of God will arrive at 
their doors ! 

Those whom our Lord felicitates are all the chil- 
dren of one family ; and everything that can be 
called blessed or blessing comes of the same right- 
eousness. If a disciple be blessed because of any 
one thing, every other blessing is either his, or on 
the way to become his; for he is on the way to 
receive the very righteousness of God. Each good 
thing opens the door to the one next it, so to all 
the rest. But as if these his assurances and 
promises and comfortings were not large enough ; 
as if the mention of any condition whatever might 
discourage some humble man of heart with a sense 
of unfitness, with the fear, perhaps conviction, that 
the promise was not for him ; as if some one might 
say, "Alas, I am proud, and neither poor in spirit 
nor meek ; I am at times not at all hungry after 
righteousness ; I am not half merciful, and am very 
ready to feel hurt and indignant : I am shut out 
from every blessing ! " — the Lord, knowing the mul- 
titudes that can urge nothing in their own favor, 



152 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

and sorely feel they are not blessed, looks abroad 
over the wide world of his brothers and sisters, and 
calls aloud, including in the boundless invitation 
every living soul with but the one qualification of 
unrest or discomfort, " Come unto me, all ye that 
labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you 



THE YOKE OF JESUS. 

At that time Jesus answered and said, — according to Luke, "In 
that hour Jesus rejoiced in spirit, and said," — I thank thee, O 
Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these 
things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto 
babes. Even so. Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight. 

All things are delivered unto me of my Father; and no man 
knoweth the Son, — according to Luke, "who the Son is," — but 
the Father ; neither knoweth any man the Father, — according to 
Luke, " who the Father is," — save the Son, and he to whomso- 
ever the Son will reveal him. — Matthew xi. 25-27 ; Luke x. 21, 22. 

Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I 
will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me, for 
I am meek and lowly in heart ; and ye shall find rest unto your 
souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. — Matthew 
xi. 28-30. 

The words of the Lord in the former two of 
these paragraphs are represented, both by Mat- 
thew and by Luke, as spoken after the denuncia- 
tion of the cities of Chorazin, Bethsaida, and Ca- 
pernaum ; only in Luke's narrative the return of 
the seventy is mentioned between ; and there the 



154 T^HE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

rejoicing of the Lord over the Father's revelation 
of himself to babes appears to have reference to the 
seventy. The fact that the return of the seventy- 
is not mentioned elsewhere leaves us free to sup- 
pose that the words were indeed spoken on that 
occasion. The circumstances, however, as circum- 
stances, are to us of little importance, not being 
necessary to the understanding of the words. 

The Lord makes no complaint against the wise 
and prudent; he but recognizes that they are not 
those to whom his Father reveals his best things, 
for which fact, and the reasons of it, he thanks or 
praises his Father. '' I bless thy will : I see that 
thou art right: I am of one mind with thee:'* 
something of each of these phases of meaning 
seems to belong to the Greek word. 

" But why not reveal true things first to the 
wise? Are they not the fittest to receive them?" 
Yes, if these things and their wisdom lie in the 
same region — not otherwise. No amount of knowl- 
edge or skill in physical science will make a man 
the fitter to argue a metaphysical question; and 
the wisdom of this world, meaning by the term, 
the philosophy of prudence, self-protection, precau- 
tion, specially unfits a man for receiving what the 



THE YOKE OF JESUS, 1 55 

Father has to reveal: in proportion to our care 
about our own well-being is our incapability of 
understanding and welcoming the care of the 
Father. The wise and the prudent, with all their 
energy of thought, could never see the things of 

m 

the Father sufficiently to recognize them as true. 
Their sagacity labors in earthly things, and so fills 
their minds with their own questions and conclu- 
sions that they cannot see the eternal foundations 
God has laid in man, or the consequent necessities 
of their own nature. They are proud of finding 
out things, but the things they find out are all less 
than themselves. Because, however they have dis- 
covered them, they imagine such things the goal 
of the human intellect. If they grant there may 
be things beyond those, they either count them be- 
yond their reach, or declare themselves uninterested 
in them: for the wise and prudent they do not 
exist. They work only to gather by the senses, and 
deduce from what they have so gathered the pru- 
dential, the probable, the expedient, the protective. 
They never think of the essential, of what in itself 
must be. They are cautious, wary, discreet, ju- 
dicious, circumspect, provident, temporizing. They 
have no enthusiasm, and are shy of all forms of it 



156 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

— a clever, hard, thin people, who take things for 
the universe, and love of facts for love of truth. 
They know nothing deeper in man than mere sur- 
face mental facts and their relations. They do not 
perceive, or they turn away from any truth which 
the intellect cannot formulate. Zeal for God will 
never eat them up : why should it ? he is not in- 
teresting to them : theology may be ; to such men 
religion means theology. How should the treasure 
of the Father be open to such? In their hands his 
rubies would draw in their fire, and cease to glow. 
The roses of paradise in their gardens would blow 
withered. They never go beyond the porch of the 
temple; they are not sure whether there be any 
adytuifiy and they do not care to go in and see: 
why indeed should they? it would but be to turn 
and come out again. Even when they know their 
duty, they must take it to pieces, and consider the 
grounds of its claim before they will render it 
obedience. All those evil doctrines about God that 
work misery and madness have their origin in the 
brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of 
the children. These wise and prudent, careful to 
make the words of his messengers rime with their 
conclusions, interpret the great heart of God, not 



THE YOKE OF JESUS, 157 

by their own hearts, but by their miserable intel- 
lects; and, postponing the obedience which alone 
can give power to the understanding, press upon 
men's minds their wretched interpretations of the 
will of the Father, instead of the doing of that will 
upon their hearts. They call their philosophy the 
truth of God, and say men must hold it, or stand 
outside. They are the slaves of the letter in all its 
weakness and imperfection, — and will be until the 
spirit of the Word, the spirit of obedience, shall set 
them free. 

The babes must beware lest the wise and pru- 
dent come between them and the Father. They 
must yield no claim to authority over their belief, 
made by man or community, by church any more 
than by synagogue. That alone is for them to be- 
lieve which the Lord reveals to their souls as true ; 
that alone is it possible for them to believe with 
what he counts belief. The divine object for which 
teacher or church exists is the persuasion of the in- 
dividual heart to come to Jesus, the Spirit, to be 
taught what he alone can teach. 

Terribly has his gospel suffered in the mouths of 
the wise and prudent : how would it be faring now, 
had its first messages been committed to persons 



158 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

of repute, instead of those simple fishermen? It 
would be nowhere, or, if anywhere, unrecogniza- 
ble. From the first we should have had a system 
founded on a human interpretation of the divine 
gospel, instead of the gospel itself, which would 
have disappeared. As it is, we have had one dull, 
miserable human system after another usurping its 
place ; but, thank God, the gospel remains ! The 
little child, heedless of his trailing cloud of glory, 
and looking about him aghast in an unknown world, 
may yet see and run to the arms open to the chil- 
dren. How often has not some symbol employed 
in the New Testament been forced into the serv- 
ice of argument for one or another contemptible 
scheme of redemption, which were no redemption ; 
while the truth for the sake of which' the symbol 
was used, the thing meant to be conveyed by it, 
has lain unregarded beside the heap of rubbish! 
Had the wise and prudent been the confidants of 
God, I repeat, the letter would at once have usurped 
the place of the spirit ; the ministering slave would 
have been set over the household ; a system of re- 
ligion, with its rickety, malodorous plan of salva- 
tion, would not only have at once been put in the 
place of a living Christ, but would yet have held 



THE YOKE OF JESUS, 1 59 

that place. The great Brother, the human God, 
the eternal Son, the living One, would have been 
as utterly hidden from the tearful eyes and aching 
hearts of the weary and heavy-laden as if he had 
never come from the deeps of love to call the chil- 
dren home out of the shadows of a self-haunted 
universe. But the Father revealed the Father's 
things to his babes ; the babes loved, and began to 
do them, therewith began to understand them, and 
went on growing in the knowledge of them and in 
the power of communicating them; while to the 
wise and prudent the deepest words of the most 
babe-like of them all, John Boanerges, even now 
appear but a finger- worn rosary of platitudes. The 
babe understands the wise and prudent, but is un- 
derstood only by the babe. 

The Father, then, revealed his things to babes, 
because the babes were his own little ones, uncor- 
rupted by the wisdom or the care of this world, 
and therefore able to receive them. The others, 
though his children, had not begun to be like him, 
therefore could not receive them. The Father's 
things could not have got anyhow into their minds 
without leaving all their value, all their spirit, out- 
side the unchildlike place. The babes are near 



l6o THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

enough whence they come to understand a little 
how things go in the presence of their Father in 
heaven, and thereby to interpret the words of the 
Son. The child who has not yet " walked above 
a mile or two from " his '* first love " is not out of 
touch with the mind of his Father. Quickly will 
he seal the old bond when the Son himself, the 
first of the babes, the one perfect babe of God, 
comes to lead the children out of the lovely 
" shadows of eternity " into the land of the " white 
celestial thought." As God is the one only real 
Father, so is it only to God that any one can be a 
perfect child. In his garden only can childhood 
blossom. 

The leader of the great array of Httle ones, him- 
self, in virtue of his first-bom childhood, the first 
recipient of the revelations of his Father, having 
thus given thanks, and said why he gave thanks, 
breaks out afresh, renewing expression of delight 
that God had willed it thus : '' Even so. Father, 
for so it seemed good in thy sight ! " I venture to 
translate, '' Yea, O Father, for thus came forth 
satisfaction before thee!" and think he meant, 
" Yea, Father, for thereat were all thy angels filled 
with satisfaction." The babes were the prophets 



THE YOKE OF JESUS, l6l 

in heaven, and the angels were glad to find it was 
to be so upon the earth also ; they rejoiced to see 
that what was bound in heaven was bound on 
earth ; that the same principle held in each. (Com- 
pare Matt, xviii. lo and 14; also Luke xv. 10.) 
" See that ye despise not one of these httle ones ; 
for I say unto you that their angels in heaven do 
always behold the face of my Father which is in 
heaven. . . . Thus it is not the will before your 
Father which is in heaven," — among the angels 
who stand before him^ I think he means, — " that 
one of these little ones should perish." " Even so, 
I say unto you, there is joy in the presence of the 
angels of God over one sinner that repenteth." 

Having thus thanked his Father that he has 
done after his own " good and acceptable and per- 
fect will," he turns to his disciples, and tells them 
that he knows the Father, being his Son, and that 
he only can reveal the Father to the rest of his 
children : "All things are delivered unto me of my 
Father; and no one knoweth the Son but the 
Father ; neither knoweth any one the Father save 
the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son willeth to 
reveal him." It is almost as if his mention of the 

babes brought his thoughts back to himself and his 
II 



1 62 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

Father, between whom lay the secret of all life and 
all sending — yea, all loving. The relation of the 
Father and the Son contains the idea of the uni- 
verse. Jesus tells his disciples that his Father had 
no secrets from him ; that he knew the Father as 
the Father knew him. The Son must know the 
Father; he only could know him — and knowing, 
he could reveal him; the Son could make the 
other, the imperfect children, know the Father, and 
so become such as he. All things were given unto 
him by the Father, because he was the Son of the 
Father: for the same reason he could reveal the 
things of the Father to the child of the Father. 
The child- relation is the one eternal, ever- endur- 
ing, never- changing relation. 

Note that, while the Lord here represents the 
knowledge his Father and he have each of the other 
as Hmited to themselves, the statement is one of 
fact only, not of design or intention : his presence 
in the world is for the removal of that limitation. 
The Father knows the Son, and sends him to us 
that we may know him ; the Son knows the Father, 
and dies to reveal him. The glory of God's 
mysteries is, that they are for his children to 
look into. 



THE YOKE OF JESUS. 1 63 

When the Lord took the little child in the pres- 
ence of his disciples, and declared him his repre- 
sentative, he made him the representative of his 
Father also ; but the eternal Child alone can reveal 
him. To reveal is immeasurably more than to rep- 
resent ; it is to present to the eyes that know the 
true when they see it. Jesus represented God; 
the spirit of Jesus reveals God. The represented 
God a man may refuse ; many refused the Lord ; 
the revealed God no one can refuse; to see God 
and to love him are one. He can be revealed only 
to the child ; perfectly, to the pure child only. All 
the discipline of the world is to make men children, 
that God may be revealed to them. 

No man, when first he comes to himself, can 
have any true knowledge of God; he can only 
have a desire after such knowledge. But while he 
does not know him at all, he cannot become in his 
heart God's child ; so the Father must draw nearer 
to him. He sends therefore his First-born, who 
does know him, is exactly like him, and can repre- 
sent him perfectly. Drawn to him, the children 
receive him, and then he is able to reveal the 
Father to them. No wisdom of the wise can find 
out God ; no words of the God-loving can reveal 



1 64 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

him. The simplicity of the whole natural relation 
is too deep for the philosopher. The Son alone 
can reveal God; the child alone understand him. 
The Elder Brother companies with the younger, 
and makes him yet more a child like himself. He 
interpenetrates his willing companion with his 
obedient glory. He lets him see how he deHghts 
in his Father, and lets him know that God is his 
Father too. He rouses in his little brother the 
sense of their Father's will ; and the younger, as 
he hears and obeys, begins to see that his Elder 
Brother must be the very^ image of their Father. 
He becomes more and more of a child, and more 
and more the Son reveals to him the Father. For 
he knows that to know the Father is the one thing 
needful to every child of the Father, the one thing 
to fill the divine gulf of his necessity. To see the 
Father is the cry of ever}' child-heart in the uni- 
verse of the Father — is the need, where not the 
cry, of every living soul. Comfort yourselves, then, 
brothers and sisters ; he to whom the Son will re- 
veal him shall know the Father ; and the Son came 
to us that he might reveal him. " Eternal Brother," 
we cry, ''show us the Father. Be thyself to us, 
that in thee we may know him. We too are his 



THE YOKE OF JESUS, 1 65 

children : let the other children share with thee in 
the things of the Father." 

Having spoken to his Father first, and now to 
his disciples, the Lord turns to the whole world, 
and lets his heart overflow: — St. Matthew alone 
has saved for us the eternal cry : — ''Come unto me, 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest." — " I know the Father; come then 
to me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden." He 
does not here call those who want to know the 
Father ; his cry goes far beyond them ; it reaches 
to the ends of the earth. He calls those who are 
weary ; those who do not know that ignorance of 
the Father is the cause of all their labor and the 
heaviness of their burden. " Come unto me," he 
says, " and I will give you rest." 

This is the Lord's own form of his gospel, more 
intensely personal and direct, at the same time of 
yet wider inclusion, than that which, at Nazareth, 
he appropriated from Isaiah ; differing from it also 
in this, that it is interfused with strongest per- 
suasion to the troubled to enter into and share his 
own eternal rest. I will turn his argument a little. 
*' I have ,rest because I know the Father. Be 
meek and lowly of heart toward him as I am ; let 



1 66 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

him lay his yoke upon you as he lays it on me. I 
do his will, not my own. Take on you the yoke 
that I wear ; be his child like me ; become a babe 
to whom he can reveal his wonders. Then shall you 
too find rest to your souls ; you shall have the same 
peace I have ; you will be weary and heavy laden 
no more. I find my yoke easy, my burden light.'* 

We must not imagine that, when the Lord says, 
"Take my yoke upon you," he means a yoke 
which he lays on those that come to him ; " my 
yoke " is the yoke he wears himself, the yoke his 
Father lays upon him, the yoke out of which, that 
same moment, he speaks, bearing it with glad 
patience. " You must take on you the yoke I 
have taken: the Father lays it upon us." 

The best of the good wine remains ; I have kept 
it to the last. A friend pointed out to me that the 
Master does not mean we must take on us a yoke 
like his ; we must take on us the very yoke he is 
carrying. 

Dante, describing how, on the first terrace of 
Purgatory, he walked stooping, to be on a level 
with Oderisi, who went bowed to the ground by 
the ponderous burden of the pride he had cher- 
ished on earth, says, '' I went walking with this 



THE YOKE OF JESUS. 1 67 

heavy-laden soul, just as oxen walk in the yoke " : 
this picture almost always comes to me with the 
words of the Lord, " Take my yoke upon you, and 
learn of me." Their intent is, "Take the other 
end of my yoke, doing as I do, being as I am." 
Think of it a moment : to walk in the same yoke 
with the Son of Man, doing the same labor with 
him, and having the same feeling common to him 
and us ! This, and nothing else, is offered the man 
who would have rest to his soul ; is required of the 
man who would know the Father ; is by the Lord 
pressed upon him to whom he would give the same 
peace which pervades and sustains his own eternal 
heart. 

But a yoke is for drawing withal : what load is 
it the Lord is drawing? Wherewith is the cart 
laden which he would have us help him draw? 
With what but the will of the eternal, the perfect 
Father? How should the Father honor the Son, 
but by giving him his will to embody in deed, by 
making him hand to his Father's heart ! — and hard- 
est of all, in bringing home his children ! Specially 
in drawing this load must his yoke-fellow share. 
How to draw it, he must learn of him who draws 
by his side. 



1 68 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

Whoever, in the commonest duties that fall to 
him, does as the Father would have him do, bears 
his yoke along with' Jesus; and the Father takes 
his help for the redemption of the world — for the 
dehverance of men from the slavery of their own 
rubbish-laden wagons, into the liberty of God's 
husbandmen. Bearing the same yoke with Jesus, 
the man learns to walk step for step with him 
drawing, drawing the cart laden with the will of 
the Father of both, and rejoicing with the joy of 
Jesus. The glory of existence is to take up its 
burden, and exist for Existence eternal and su- 
preme — for the Father who does his divine and 
perfect best to impart his glad life to us, making us 
sharers of that nature which is bliss, and that labor 
which is peace. He lives for us ; we must live for 
him. The little ones must take their full share in 
the great Father's work : his work is the business 
of the family. 

Starts thy soul, trembles thy brain at the thought 
of such a burden as the will of the eternally creat- 
ing, eternally saving God ? " How shall mortal 
man walk in such a yoke," say est thou, '* even with 
the Son of God bearing it also?" 

Why, brother, sister, it is the only burden bear- 



THE YOKE OF JESUS. 1 69 

able — the only burden that can be borne of mortal ! 
Under any other, the lightest, he must at last sink 
outworn, his very soul gray with sickness! 

He on whom lay the other half of the burden of 
God, the weight of his creation to redeem, says, 
'' The yoke I bear is easy ; the burden I draw is 
light"; and this he said, knowing the death he 
was to die. The yoke did not gall his neck, the 
burden did not overstrain his sinews, neither did 
the goal on Calvary fright him from the straight 
way thither. He had the will of the Father to 
work out, and that will was his strength as well as 
his joy. He had the same will as his Father. To 
him the one thing worth living for was the share 
the love of his Father gave him in his work. He 
loved his Father even to the death of the cross, 
and eternally beyond it. 

When we give ourselves up to the Father as the 
Son gave himself, we shall not only find our yoke 
easy and our burden light, but that they communi- 
cate ease and lightness; not only will they not 
make us weary, but they will give us rest from all 
other weariness. Let us not waste a moment in 
asking how this can be ; the only way to know 
that is to take the yoke on us. That rest is a se- 



I JO THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

cret for every heart to know, for never a tongue to 
tell. Only by having it can we know it. If it 
seem impossible to take the yoke on us, let us at- 
tempt the impossible ; let us lay hold of the yoke, 
and bow our heads, and try to get our necks under 
it. Giving our Father the opportunity, he will help 
and not fail us. He is helping us every moment, 
when least we think we need his help ; when most 
we think w^e do, then may we most boldly, as most 
earnestly we must, cry for it. What or how much 
his creatures can do or bear, God only under- 
stands ; but when most it seems impossible to do 
or bear, we must be most confident that he will 
neither demand too much, nor fail with the vital 
creator-help. That help will be there when wanted 
— that is, the moment it can be help. ' To be able 
beforehand to imagine ourselves doing or bearing, 
we have neither claim nor need. 

It is vain to think that any weariness, however 
caused, any burden, however sHght, may be got 
rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the 
yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other 
rest for heart and soul that he has created. From 
every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread 
of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke 
will set us free. 



THE YOKE OF JESUS. 171 

These words of the Lord — so many as are re- 
ported in common by St. Matthew and St. Luke, 
namely, his thanksgiving, and his statement con- 
cerning the mutual knowledge of his Father and 
himself, meet me like a well-known face unex- 
pectedly encountered : they come to me like a 
piece of heavenly bread cut from the gospel of St. 
John. The words are not in that gospel, and in 
St. Matthew's and St. Luke's there is nothing more 
of the kind — in St Mark's nothing Hke them. The 
passage seems to me just one solitary flower tes- 
tifying to the presence in the gospels of Matthew 
and Luke of the same root of thought and feeling 
which everywhere blossoms in that of John. It 
looks as if it had crept out of the fourth gospel 
into the first and third, and seems a true sign, 
though no proof, that, however much the fourth be 
unHke the other gospels, they have all the same 
origin. Some disciple was able to remember one 
such word of which the promised comforter 
brought many to the remembrance of John. I do 
not see how the more phenomenal gospels are ever 
to be understood, save through a right perception 
of the relation in which the Lord stands to his 
Father, which relation is the main subject of the 
gospel according to St. John. 



172 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

As to the loving cry of the Great Brother to the 
whole weary world which Matthew alone has set 
down, I seem aware of a certain indescribable in- 
dividuality in its tone, distinguishing it from all his 
other sayings on record. 

Those who come at the call of the Lord, and 
take the rest he offers them, learning of him, and 
bearing the yoke of the Father, are the salt of the 
earth, the light of the world. 



THE SALT AND THE LIGHT OF THE 
WORLD. 

Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost his 
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for 
nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men. 
Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot 
be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, 
but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the 
house. Let your light so shine before men, that they may see 
your good works, and glorify your Father which is in heaven. — 
Matthew v. 13-16. 

The Lord knew these men, and had their hearts 
in his hand ; else would he have told them they 
were the salt of the earth and the light of the 
world? They were in danger, it is true, of plum- 
ing themselves on what he had said of them, of 
taking their importance to their own credit, and 
seeing themselves other than God saw them. Yet 
the Lord does not hesitate to call his few humble 
disciples the salt of the earth ; and every century 
since has borne witness that such indeed they 



174 I^HE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

were — that he spoke of them but the simple fact. 
Where would the world be now but for their salt 
and their light! The world that knows neither 
their salt nor their light may imagine itself now at 
least greatly retarded by the long-drawn survival 
of their influences ; but such as have chosen aspi- 
ration and not ambition will cry, But for those 
men, whither should we at this moment be bound ? 
Their Master set them to be salt against corruption, 
and light against darkness ; and our souls answer 
and say, Lord, they have been the salt, they have 
been the light of the world ! 

No sooner had he used the symbol of the salt, 
than the Lord proceeds to supplement its incom- 
pleteness. They were salt which must remember 
that it is salt; which must live salt, and choose 
salt, and be salt. For the whole worth of salt lies 
in its being salt ; and all the saltness of the moral 
salt lies in the will to be salt. To lose its saltness, 
then, is to cease to exist, save as a vile thing whose 
very being is unjustifiable. What is to be done 
with saltless salt! — with such as would teach re- 
ligion and know not God ! 

Having thus carried the figure as far as it will 
serve him, the Master changes it for another, which 



THE SALT AND LIGHT OF THE WORLD. I 75 

he can carry further. For salt only preserves from 
growing bad ; it does not cause anything to grow 
better. His disciples are the salt of the world, but 
they are more. Therefore, having warned the hu- 
man salt to look to itself that it be indeed salt, he 
proceeds : '* Ye are the light of the world, a city, 
a candle," and so resumes his former path of per- 
suasion and enforcement : '' It is so, therefore 
make it so." — " Ye are the salt of the earth ; there- 
fore be salt." — ''Ye are the light of the world; 
therefore shine." — "Ye are a city; be seen upon 
your hill." — '* Ye are the Lord's candles; let no 
bushels cover you. Let your Hght shine." Every 
disciple of the Lord must be a preacher of right- 
eousness. 

Cities are the best lighted portions of the world ; 
and perhaps the Lord meant, '* You are a live city, 
therefore light up your city." Some connection of 
the city with light seems probably in his thought, 
seeing the allusion to the city on the hill comes in 
the midst of what he says about light in relation to 
his disciples as the light of the world. Anyhow 
the city is the best circle in which, and the best 
center from which, to diffuse moral light. A 
man brooding in the desert may find the very 



176 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

light of light, but he must go to the city to let 
it shine. 

From the general idea of light, however, asso- 
ciated with the city as visible to all the country 
around, the Lord turns at once, in this probably 
fragmentary representation of his words, to the 
homeHer, the more individual and personally ap- 
plicable figure of the lamp : '' Neither do men light 
a lamp, and put it under a bushel, but on a lamp- 
stand, and it giveth light to all that are in the 
house." 

Here let us meditate a moment. For what is a 
lamp or a man lighted ? For them that need light, 
therefore for all. A candle is not lighted for it- 
self ; neither is a man. The light that serves self 
only is no true light ; its one virtue is that it will 
soon go out. The bushel needs to be Hghted, but 
not by being put over the lamp. The man's own 
soul needs to be lighted, but light for itself only, 
light covered by the bushel, is darkness whether to 
soul or bushel. Light unshared is darkness. To 
be light indeed, it must shine out. It is of the 
very essence of light, that it is for others. The 
thing is true of the spiritual as of the physical light 
■■ — of the truth as of its type. 



THE SALT AND LIGHT OF THE WORLD. I 77 

The lights of the world are live lights. The 

lamp that the Lord kindles is a lamp that can will 

to shine, a soul that must shine. Its true relation 

to the spirits around it — to God and its fellows — is 

its Hght. Then only does It fully shine, when its 

love, which is its light, shows it to all the souls 

within its scope, and all those souls to each other, 

and so does its part to bring all together toward 

one. In the darkness each soul is alone ; in the 

light the souls are a family. Men do not light a 

lamp to kill it with a bushel, but to set it on a 

stand, that it may give light to all that are in the 

house. The Lord seems to say, '' So have I lighted 

you, not that you may shine for yourselves, but 

that you may give light unto all. I have set you 

like a city on a hill, that the whole earth may see 

and share in your light. Shine therefore ; so shine 

before men, that they may see your good things 

and glorify your Father for the light with which he 

has lighted you. Take heed to your light that it 

be such, that it so shine, that in you men may see 

the Father — may see your works so good, so 

plainly his, that they recognize his presence in you, 

and thank him for you." There was the danger 

always of the shadow of the self-bushel clouding 
12 



178 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

the lamp the Father had lighted ; and the moment 
they ceased to show the Father, the light that was 
in them was darkness. God alone is the light, and 
our light is the shining of his will in our lives. If 
our light shine at all, it must be, it can be only in 
showing the Father ; nothing is light that does not 
bear him witness. The man that sees the glory of 
God would turn sick at the thought of glorifying 
his own self, whose one only possible glory is to 
shine with the glory of God. When a man tries 
to shine from the self that is not one with God and 
filled with his light, he is but making ready for his 
own gathering contempt. The man who, like his 
Lord, seeks not his own, but the will of him who 
sent him, he alone shines. He who would shine 
in the praises of men will, sooner or later, find him- 
self but a Gideon's-pitcher left broken on the field. 

Let us bestir ourselves, then, to keep this word 
of the Lord ; and to this end inquire how we are 
to let our light shine. 

To the man who does not try to order his 
thoughts and feelings and judgments after the will 
of the Father, I have nothing to say ; he can have 
no light to let shine. For to let our light shine is 
to see that in every, even the smallest thing, our 



THE SAL T AND LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 79 

lives and actions correspond to what we know of 
God; that, as the true children of our Father in 
heaven, we do everything as he would have us do 
it. Need I say that to let our Hght shine is to be 
just, honorable, true, courteous, more careful over 
the claim of our neighbor than our own, as know- 
ing ourselves in danger of overlooking it, and not 
bound to insist on every claim of our own ! The 
man who takes no count of what is fair, friendly, 
pure, unselfish, lovely, gracious, — where is his 
claim to call Jesus his master? where his claim to 
Christianity? What saves his claim from being 
merest mockery? 

The outshining of any human light must be 
obedience to truth recognized as such; our first 
show of light as the Lord's disciples must be in 
doing the things he tells us. Naturally thus we 
declare him our Master, the ruler of our conduct, 
the enlightener of our souls; and while in the 
doing of his will a man is learning the loveliness of 
righteousness, he can hardly fail to let some light 
shine across the dust of his failures, the exhala- 
tions from his faults. Thus will his disciples shine 
as lights in the world, holding forth the Word of 
life. 



l8o THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

To shine, we must keep in his light, sunning our 
souls in it by thinking of what he said and did, 
and would have us think and do. So shall we 
drink the light like some diamonds, keep it, and 
shine in the dark. Doing his will, men will see in 
us that we count the world his, hold that his will 
and not ours must be done in it. Our very faces 
will then shine with the hope of seeing him, and 
being taken home where he is. Only let us re- 
member that trying to look what we ought to be 
is the beginning of hypocrisy. 

If we do indeed expect better things to come, 
we must let our hope appear. A Christian who 
looks gloomy at the mention of death, still more, 
one who talks of his friends as if he had lost them, 
turns the bushel of his little-faith over the lamp of 
the Lord's Hght. Death is but our visible horizon, 
and our look ought always to be focused beyond it. 
We should never talk as if death were the end of 
anything. 

To let our light shine, we must take care that 
we have no respect for riches : if we have none, 
there is no fear of our showing any. To treat 
the poor man with less attention or cordiaHty 
than the rich is to show ourselves the servants of 



THE SALT AND LIGHT OF THE WORLD. l8l 

Mammon. In like manner we must lay no value 
on the praise of men, or in any way seek it. We 
must honor no man because of intellect, fame, or 
success. We must not shrink, in fear of the judg- 
ment of men, from doing openly what we hold 
right ; or at all acknowledge as a law- giver what 
calls itself Society, or harbor the least anxiety for 
its approval. 

In business, the custom of the trade must be 
understood by both contracting parties, else it can 
have no place, either as law or excuse, with the 
disciple of Jesus. The man to whom business is 
one thing and religion another is not a disciple. If 
he refuses to harmonize them by making his busi- 
ness religion, he has already chosen Mammon ; if 
he thinks not to settle the question, it is settled. 
The most futile of all human endeavors is, to serve 
God and Mammon. The man who makes the en- 
deavor betrays his Master in the temple and kisses 
him in the garden ; takes advantage of him in the 
shop, and offers him " divine service! " on Sunday. 
His very church-going is but a further service 
of Mammon! But let us waste no strength in 
despising such men; let us rather turn the light 
upon ourselves : are we not in some way denying 



l82 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

him ? Is our light bearing witness ? Is it shining 
before men so that they glorify God for it ? If it 
does not shine, it is darkness. In the darkness 
which a man takes for light, he will thrust at the 
heart of the Lord himself. 

He who goes about his every- day duty as the 
work the Father has given him to do is he who 
lets his light shine. But such a man will not be 
content with this : he must yet let his light shine. 
Whatever makes his heart glad, he w411 have his 
neighbor share. The body is a lantern ; it must 
not be a dark lantern ; the glowing heart must 
show in the shining face. His glad thought may 
not be one to impart to his neighbor, but he must 
not quench the vibration of its gladness ere it reach 
him. What shall we say of him who comes from 
his closet, his mountain-top, with such a veil over 
his face as masks his very humanity ? Is it with 
the Father that man has had communion, whose 
every movement is self-hampered, and in whose 
eyes dwell no smiles for the people of his house? 
The man who receives the quiet attentions, the di- 
vine ministrations, of wife or son or daughter, with- 
out token of pleasure, without sign of gratitude, 
can hardly have been with Jesus. Or can he have 



THE SALT AND LIGHT OF THE WORLD. 1 83 

been with him, and have left him behind in his 
closet? If his faith in God take from a man his 
cheerfulness, how shall the face of a man ever 
shine ? And why are they always glad before the 
face of the Father in heaven ? It is true that pain 
or inward grief may blameless banish all smiling, 
but even heaviness of heart has no right so to tum- 
ble the bushel over the lamp that no ray can get 
out to tell that love is yet burning within. The 
man must at least let his dear ones know that 
something else than displeasure with them is the 
cause of his clouded countenance. 

What a sweet color the divine light takes to 
itself in courtesy, whose perfection is the recog- 
nition of every man as a temple of the living God. 
Sorely ruined, sadly defiled the temple may be, 
but if God had left it it would be a heap and not 
a house. 

Next to love, specially will the light shine out in 
fairness. What Hght can he have in him who is 
always on his own side, and will never descry 
reason or right on that of his adversary? And 
certainly, if he that showeth mercy, as well he 
that showeth justice, ought to do it with cheer- 
fulness. 



1 84 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

But if all our light shine out, and none of our 
darkness, shall we not be in utmost danger of 
hypocrisy? Yes, if we but hide our darkness, 
and do not strive to slay it with our light : what 
way have we to show it, while struggling to de- 
stroy it? Only when we cherish evil is there 
hypocrisy in hiding it. A man who is honestly 
fighting it and showing it no quarter is already 
conqueror in Christ, or will soon be — and more 
than innocent. But our good feelings, those that 
make for righteousness and unity, we ought to let 
shine; they claim to commune with the light in 
others. Many parents hold words unsaid which 
would lift hundredweights from the hearts of their 
children, yea, make them leap for joy. A stern 
father and a silent mother make rriournful, or, 
which is far worse, hard children. Need I add 
that, if any one, hearing the injunction to let his 
light shine, makes himself shine instead, it is be- 
cause the light is not in him ! 

But what shall I say of such as, in the name of 
religion, let only their darkness out — the darkness 
of worshiped opinion, the darkness of lip-honor and 
disobedience! Such are those who tear asunder 
the body of Christ with the explosives of dispute, 



THE SALT AND LIGHT OF THE WORLD, 1 85 

on the plea of such a unity as alone they can un- 
derstand, namely, a paltry uniformity. What have 
not the " good Churchman " and the " strong dis- 
senter" to answer for, who, hiding what true light 
they have, if indeed they have any, each under the 
bushel of his party spirit, radiate only repulsion! 
There is no schism, none whatever, in using diverse 
forms of thought or worship : true honesty is never 
schismatic. The real schismatic is the man who 
turns away love and justice from the neighbor who 
holds theories in religious philosophy, or as to 
church-constitution, different from his own; who 
denies or avoids his brother because he follows not 
with him ; who calls him a schismatic because he 
prefers this or that mode of public worship not 
his. The other may be schismatic ; he himself cer- 
tainly is. He walks in the darkness of opinion, 
not in the light of life, not in the faith which 
worketh by love. Worst of all is division in the 
name of Christ, who came to make one. Neither 
Paul nor Apollos nor Cephas would — least of all 
will Christ be the leader of any party save that of 
his own elect, the party of love — of love which 
suffereth long and is kind ; which envieth not, is 
not puffed up, doth not behave itself unseemly, 



1 86 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

seeketh not its own, is not easily provoked, think- 
eth no evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth 
in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, 
hopeth all things, endureth all things. 

''Let your light shine," says the Lord: — if I 
have none, the call cannot apply to me; but I 
must bethink me, lest, in the night I am cherishing 
about me, the Lord come upon me like a thief. 
There may be those, however, and I think they 
are numerous, who, having some, or imagining they 
have much light, yet have not enough to know the 
duty of letting it shine on their neighbors. The 
Lord would have his men so alive with his light 
that it should forever go flashing from each to all, 
and all, with eternal response, keep glorifying the 
Father. Dost thou look for a good time coming, 
friend, when thou shalt know as thou art known? 
Let the joy of thy hope stream forth upon thy 
neighbors. Fold them round in that which maketh 
thyself glad. Let thy nature grow more expansive 
and communicative. Look like the man thou art 
— a man who knows something very good. Thou 
believest thyself on the way to the heart of things : 
walk so, shine so, that all that see thee shall want 
to go with thee. 



THE SALT AND LIGHT OF THE WORLD, 1 87 

What light issues from such as make their faces 
long at the very name of death, and look and speak 
as if it were the end of all things and the worst of 
evils ? Jesus told his men not to fear death ; told 
them his friends should go to be with him ; told 
them they should live in the house of his Father 
and their Father ; and since then he has risen him- 
self from the tomb, and gone to prepare a place for 
them: who, what are these miserable refusers of 
comfort? Not Christians, surely! Oh, yes, they 
are Christians! "They are gone," they say, *' to 
be forever with the Lord " ; and then they weep 
and lament, and seem more afraid of starting to 
join them than of aught else under the sun ! To 
the last attainable moment they cHng to what they 
call Hfe. They are children — were there ever any 
other such children? — who hang crying to the 
skirts of their mother, and will not be Hfted to her 
bosom. They are not of Paul's mind : to be with 
him is not better ! They worship their physician ; 
and their prayer to the God of their life is to spare 
them from more Hfe. What sort of Christians 
are they? Where shines their light? Alas for 
thee, poor world, hadst thou no better lights than 
these ! 



1 88 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

You who have Hght, show yourselves the sons 
and daughters of Light, of God, of Hope — the 
heirs of a great completeness. Freely let your light 
shine. 

Only take heed that ye do not your righteous- 
ness before men, to be seen of them. 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT. 

Take heed that ye do not your righteousness before men to be 
seen of them ; otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which 
is in heaven. . . . But when thou doest alms, let not thy left 
hand know what thy right hand doeth ; that thine alms may be 
in secret ; and thy Father which seeth in secret, himself shall re- 
ward thee. — Matthew vi. i, 3. 

Let your light out freely, that men may see it, 
but not that men may see you. If I do anything, 
not because it has to be done, not because God 
would have it so, not that I may do right, not 
because it is honest, not that I love the thing, not 
that I may be true to my Lord, not that the truth 
may be recognized as truth and as his, but that I 
may be seen as the doer, that I may be praised of 
men, that I may gain repute or fame ; be the thing 
itself ever so good, I may look to men for my re- 
ward, for there is none for me with the Father. 
If, that light being my pleasure, I do it that the 



I90 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

light may shine, and that men may know the Light, 
the Father of lights, I do well ; but if I do it that 
I may be seen shining, that the light may be noted 
as emanating from me and not from another, then 
am I of those that seek glory of men, and worship 
Satan; the light that through me may possibly 
illuminate others, will, in me and for me, be dark- 
ness. 

But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand 
know what thy right hand doeth. 

How, then, am I to let my light shine, if I take 
pains to hide what I do? 

The injunction is not to hide what you do from 
others, but to hide it from yourself. The Master 
would have you not plume yourself upon it, not 
cherish the thought that you have done it, or con- 
fer with yourself in satisfaction over it. You must 
not count it to your praise. A man must not de- 
sire to be satisfied with himself. His right hand 
must not seek the praise of his left hand. His do- 
ing must not invite his after-thinking. The right 
hand must let the thing done go, as a thing done 
with. We must meditate nothing either as a fine 
thing for us to do, or a fine thing for us to have 
done. We must not imagine any merit in us : it 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT. 191 

would be to love a lie, for we can have none; 
there is no such thing possible. Is there anything 
to be proud of in refusing to worship the devil? 
Is it a grand thing, is it a meritorious thing, not to 
be vile ? When we have done all, we are unprofit- 
able servants. Our very best is but decent. What 
more could it be ? Why then think of it as any- 
thing more? What things could we or any one 
do, worthy of being brooded over as possessions ? 
Good to do, they were ; bad to pride ourselves upon, 
they are. Why should a man meditate with satis- 
faction on having denied himself some selfish in- 
dulgence, any more than on having washed his 
hands? May we roll the rejection of a villainy as 
a sweet morsel under our tongues? They were 
the worst villains of all who could be proud of not 
having committed a villainy ; and their pride 
would but render them the more capable of the 
villainy when next the temptation to it came. 
Even if our supposed merit were of the positive 
order, and we did every duty perfectly, the mo- 
ment we began to pride ourselves upon the fact we 
should drop into a hell of worthlessness. What are 
we for but to do our duty ? We must do it, and 
think nothing of ourselves for that, neither care 



192 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

what men think of us for anything. With the 
praise or blame of men we have nought to do. 
Their blame may be a good thing, their praise can- 
not be. But the worst sort of the praise of men is 
the praise we give ourselves. We must do noth- 
ing to be seen of ourselves. We must seek no ap- 
probation even, but that of God, else we shut the 
door of the kingdom from the outside. His appro- 
bation will but quicken our sense of unworthiness. 
What ! seek the praise of men for being fair to our 
own brothers and sisters ? What ! seek the praise 
of God for laying our hearts at the feet of him to 
whom we utterly belong? There is no pride so 
mean — and all pride is absolutely, essentially mean 
— as the pride of being holier than our fellow, ex- 
cept the pride of being holy. Such imagined holi- 
ness is foulness. Religion itself, in the hearts of 
the unreal, is a dead thing; what seems life in it 
is the vermiculate life of a corpse. 

There is one word in the context, as we have it 
in the authorized version, that used to trouble me, 
seeming to make its publicity a portion of the re- 
ward for doing certain right things in secret: I 
mean the word openly, at the ends of the fourth, 
the sixth, and the eighteenth verses, making the 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT. 1 93 

Lord seem to say, "Avoid the praise of men, and 
thou shalt at length have the praise of men." 
— '* Thy Father, which seeth in secret, shall re- 
ward thee openly." Thy reward shall be seen of 
men / and thou seen as the receiver of the reward ! 
In what other way could the word, then or now, 
be fairly understood ? It must be the interpolation 
of some Jew scribe, who, even after learning a little 
of the Christ, continued unable to conceive as re- 
ward anything that did not draw part at least of 
its sweetness from the gazing eyes of the multi- 
tude. Glad was I to find that the word is not in 
the best manuscripts ; and God be thanked that it 
is left out in the revised version. What shall we 
think of the daring that could interpolate it ! But 
of like sort is the daring of much exposition of the 
Master's words. What men have not faith enough 
to receive, they will still dilute to the standard of 
their own faculty of reception. If any one say, 
** Why did the Lord let the word remain there so 
long, if he never said it? " I answer: Perhaps that 
the minds of his disciples might be troubled at its 
presence, arise against it, and do him right by cast- 
ing it out — and so Wisdom be justified of her 

children. 

13 



194 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

But there are some who, if the notion of reward 
is not naturally a trouble to them, yet have come 
to feel it such, because of the words of certain ob- 
jectors who think to take a higher stand than the 
Christian, saying the idea of reward for doing right 
is a low, an unworthy idea. Now, verily, it would 
be a low thing for any child to do his father's will 
in the hope that his father would reward him for 
it ; but it is quite another thing for a father whose 
child endeavors to please him, to let him know 
that he recognizes his childness toward him, and 
will be fatherly good to him. What kind of a 
father were the man who, because there could be 
no merit or desert in doing well, would not give 
his child a smile or a pleased word when he saw 
him trying his best ? Would not such acknowledg- 
ment from the father be the natural correlate of the 
child's behavior? and what would the father's smile 
be but the perfect reward of the child ? Suppose 
the father to love the child so that he wants to give 
him everything, but dares not until his character is 
developed: must he not be glad, and show his 
gladness, at every shade of a progress that will at 
length set him free to throne his son over all that 
he has? *' I am an unprofitable servant," says 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT. 1 95 

the man who has done his duty; but his lord, 
coming unexpectedly, and finding him at his post, 
girds himself, and makes him sit down to meat, 
and comes forth and serves him. How could the 
divine order of things, founded for growth and 
gradual betterment, hold and proceed without the 
notion of return for a thing done ? Must there be 
only current and no tide ? How can we be work- 
ers with God at his work, and he never say, 
*' Thank you, my child!" Will he take joy in his 
success and give none? Is he the husbandman to 
take all the profit, and muzzle the mouth of his 
ox ? When a man does work for another, he has 
his wages for it, and society exists by the depend- 
ence of man upon man through work and wages. 
The devil is not the inventor of this society ; he 
has invented the notion of a certain degradation in 
work, a still greater in wages ; and following this 
up, has constituted a Society after his own like- 
ness, which despises work, leaves it undone, and 
so can claim its wages without disgrace. 

If you say, " No one ought to do right for the 
sake of reward," I go further and say, " No man 
can do right for the sake of reward. A man may 
do a thing indifferent, he may do a thing wrong. 



196 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

for the sake of reward ; but a thing in itself right, 
done for reward, would, in the very doing, cease to 
be right." At the same time, if a man does right, 
he cannot escape being rewarded for it; and to 
refuse the reward would be to refuse life, and foil 
the creative love. The whole question is of the 
kind of reward expected. What first reward for 
doing well may I look for? To grow purer in 
heart, and stronger in the hope of at length see- 
ing God. If a man be not after this fashion re- 
warded, he must perish. As to happiness or any 
lower rewards that naturally follow the first — is 
God to destroy the law of his universe, the divine 
sequence of cause and effect in order to say: 
** You must do well, but you shall gain no good by 
it; you must lead a dull, joyless existence to all 
eternity, that lack of delight may show you pure " ? 
Could Love create with such end in view ? Right- 
eousness does not demand creation; it is Love, 
not Righteousness, that cannot live alone. The 
creature must already be, ere Righteousness can 
put in a claim. But, hearts and souls there. Love 
itself, which created for love and joy, presses the 
demand of Righteousness first. 

A righteousness that created misery in order to 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT, 1 97 

uphold Itself would be a righteousness that was 
unrighteous. God will die for righteousness, but 
never create for a joyless righteousness. To call 
into being the necessarily and hopelessly incom- 
plete would be to wrong creation in its very es- 
sence. To create for the knowledge of himself, 
and then not give himself, would be injustice even 
to cruelty; and if God give himself, what other 
reward — there can be no further — is not included, 
seeing he is Life and all her children — the All in 
all ? It will take the utmost joy God can give, to 
let men know him ; and what man, knowing him, 
would mind losing every other joy ? Only what 
other joy could keep from entering where the God 
of joy already dwelt? The law of the universe 
holds, and will hold, the name of the Father be 
praised : '' Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
also reap." " They have sown the wind, and they 
shall reap the whirlwind." "He that soweth to 
his flesh shall of the flesh reap corruption ; but he 
that soweth to the spirit shall of the spirit reap life 
everlasting." "Whosoever hath, to him shall be 
given, and he shall have more abundance; but 
whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away 
even that he hath." 



198 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

To object to Christianity as selfish is utter fool- 
ishness ; Christianity alone gives any hope of de- 
liverance from selfishness. Is it selfish to desire 
love ? Is it selfish to hope for purity and the sight 
of God ? What better can we do for our neighbor 
than to become altogether righteous toward him? 
Will he not be the nearer sharing in the exceeding 
great reward of a return to the divine idea? 

Where is the evil toward God, where the wrong 
to my neighbor, if I think sometimes of the joys to 
follow in the train of perfect loving? Is not the 
atmosphere of God love itself,' the very breath of 
the Father, wherein can float no thinnest pollution 
of selfishness, the only material wherewithal to 
build the airy castles of heaven? "Creator," the 
childlike heart might cry, " give me all the wages, 
all the reward thy perfect father-heart can give 
thy unmeriting child. My fit wages may be pain, 
sorrow, humiliation of soul : I stretch out my hands 
to receive them. Thy reward will be to lift me 
out of the mire of self-love, and bring me nearer 
to thyself and thy children : welcome, divinest of 
good things! Thy highest reward is thy purest 
gift; thou didst make me for it from the first; 
thou, the eternal life, hast been laboring still to fit 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT. 1 99 

me for receiving it — the vision, the knowledge, the 
possession of thyself. I can seek but what thou 
waitest and watchest to give : I would be such into 
whom thy love can flow." 

It seems to me that the only merit that could 
live before God is the merit of Jesus — who of him- 
self, at once, untaught, unimplored, laid himself 
aside, and turned to the Father, refusing his life 
save in the Father. Like God, of himself he chose 
righteousness, and so merited to sit on the throne 
of God. In the same spirit he gave himself after- 
ward to his Father's children, and merited the 
power to transfuse the life- redeeming energy of 
his spirit into theirs : made perfect, he became the 
author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey 
him. But it is a word of little daring, that Jesus 
had no thought of merit in what he did — that he 
saw only what he had to be, what he must do. — I 
speak after the poor fashion of a man lost in v/hat 
is too great for him, yet is his very life. — Where 
can be a man's merit in refusing to go down to an 
abyss of loss — loss of the right to be, loss of his 
Father, loss of himself? Would Satan, with all 
the instincts and impulses of his origin in him, have 
merited eternal life by refusing to be a devil ? Not 



200 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

the less would he have had eternal life ; not the 
less would he have been wrapt in the love and 
confidence of the Father. He would have had his 
reward. I cannot imagine thing created meriting 
aught save by divine courtesy. 

I suspect the notion of merit belongs to a low 
development, and the higher a man rises, the less 
will he find it worth a thought. Perhaps we shall 
come to see that it owes what being it has to man, 
that it is a thing thinkable only by man. I sus- 
pect it is not a thought of the eternal mind, and 
has in itself no existence, being to God merely a 
thing thought by man. 

For merit lives from man to man, 
And not from man, O Lord, to thee. 

The man, then, who does right, and seeks no 
praise from men, while he merits nothing, shall be 
rewarded by his Father, and his reward will be 
right precious to him. 

We must let our light shine, make our faith, our 
hope, our love, manifest — that men may praise, not 
us for shining, but the Father for creating the light. 
No man with faith, hope, love, alive in his soul, 
could make the divine possessions a show to gain 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT 201 

for himself the admiration of men : not the less 
must they appear in our words, in our looks, in our 
carriage — above all, in honorable, unselfish, hos- 
pitable, helpful deeds. Our light must shine in 
cheerfulness, in joy, yea, where a man has the gift, 
in merriment ; in freedom from care save for one 
another, in interest in the things of others, in fear- 
lessness and tenderness, in courtesy and gracious- 
ness. In our anger and indignation, specially, 
must our light shine. But we must give no quarter 
to the most shadowy thought of how this or that 
will look. From the faintest thought of the praise 
of men, we must turn away. No man can be the 
disciple of Christ and desire fame. To desire fame 
is ignoble ; it is a beggarly greed. In the noble 
mind, it is the more of an infirmity. There is no 
aspiration in it — nothing but ambition. It is simply 
selfishness that would be proud if it could. Fame 
is the applause of the many, and the judgment 
of the many is foolish ; therefore the greater the 
fame, the more is the foolishness that swells it, and 
the worse is the foolishness that longs after it. As- 
piration is the sole escape from ambition. He who 
aspires — that is, does his endeavor to rise above 
himself — neither lusts to be higher than his neigh- 



202 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

bor, nor seeks to mount in his opinion. What light 
there is in him shines the more that he does noth- 
ing to be seen of men. He stands in the mist be- 
tween the gulf and the glory, and looks upward. 
He loves not his own soul, but longs to be clean. 

Out of the gulf into the glory, 

Father, my soul cries out to be lifted. 
Dark is the woof of my dismal story, 

Thorough thy sun-warp stormily drifted! — 
Out of the gulf into the glory, 
Lift me, and save my story. 

I have done many things merely shameful ; 

I am a man ashamed, my Father ! 
My life is ashamed and broken and blameful — 

The broken and blameful, oh, cleanse and gather! 
Heartily shame me. Lord, of the shameful! 
To my judge I flee with my blameful. 

Saviour, at peace in thy perfect purity, 

Think what it is, not to be pure! 
Strong in thy love's essential security, 

Think upon those who are never secure. 
Full fill my soul with the light of thy purity ; 
Fold me in love's security. 

O Father, O Brother, my heart is sore aching! 

Help it to ache as much as is needful ; 
Is it you cleansing me, mending, remaking, 

Dear potter-hands, so tender and heedful? 



THE RIGHT HAND AND THE LEFT. 203 

Sick of my past, of my own self aching — 
Hurt on, dear hands, with your making. 

Proud of the form thou hadst given thy vessel, 

Proud of myself, I forgot my donor ; 
Down in the dust I began to nestle, 

Poured thee no wine, and drank deep of dishonor! 
Lord, thou hast broken, thou mendest thy vessel! 
In the dust of thy glory I nestle. 

O Lord, the earnest expectation of thy creature 
waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 

For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the man- 
ifestation of the sons of God. — Romans viii. 19. 

Let us try, through these words, to get at the 
idea in St. Paul's mind for which they stand, and 
have so long stood. It can be no worthless idea 
they represent — no mere platitude, which a man, 
failing to understand it at once, may without loss 
leave behind him. The words mean something 
which Paul believes vitally associated with the life 
and death of his Master. He had seen Jesus with 
his bodily eyes, I think, but he had not seen him 
with those alone ; he had seen and saw him with 
the real eyes, the eyes that do not see except they 
understand ; and the sight of him had uplifted his 
whole nature — first his pure will for righteousness, 
and then his hoping imagination ; and out of these, 
in the knowledge of Jesus, he spoke. 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE, 205 

The letters he has left behind him, written in 
the power of this uplifting, have waked but poor 
ideas in poor minds ; for words, if they seem to 
mean anything, must always seem to mean some-, 
thing within the scope of the mind hearing them. 
Words cannot convey the thought of a thinker to 
a no- thinker ; of a largely aspiring and self- discon- 
tented soul, to a creature satisfied with his poverty, 
and counting his meager faculty the human stand- 
ard. Neither will they readily reveal the mind of 
one old in thought, to one who has but lately be- 
gun to think. The higher the reader's notion of 
what St. Paul intends — the higher the idea, that is, 
which his words wake in him, the more likely is it 
to be the same which moved the man who had 
seen Jesus, and was his own no more. If a man 
err in his interpretation, it will hardly be by attrib- 
uting to his words an intent too high. 

First then, what does Paul, the slave of Christ, 
intend by '' the creature " or '* the creation " ? If 
he means the visible world, he did not surely, and 
without saying so, mean to exclude the noblest 
part of it — the sentient! If he did, it is doubly 
strange that he should immediately attribute not 
merely sense, but conscious sense, to that part, the 



206 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

insentient, namely, which remained. If you say he 
does so but by a figure of speech, I answer that 
a figure that meant less than it said — and how 
much less would not this? — would be one alto- 
gether unworthy of the Lord's messenger. 

First, I repeat, to exclude the sentient from the 
term common to both in the word creation or creat- 
tire — and then to attribute the capabilities of the 
sentient to the insentient, as a mere figure to ex- 
press the hopes of men with regard to the perfect- 
ing of the insentient for the comfort of men, were 
a violence as unfit in rhetoric as in its own nature. 
Take another part of the same utterance : '' For we 
know that the whole creation groaneth and travail- 
eth in pain together until now " : is it not manifest 
that to interpret such words as referring to the 
mere imperfections of the insensate material world 
would be to make of the phrase a worthless hyper- 
bole? I am inclined to believe the apostle re- 
garded the whole visible creation as, in far differing 
degrees of consciousness, a live outcome from the 
heart of the living one, who is all and in all : such 
view, at the same time, I do not care to insist upon ; 
I only care to argue that the word creature or crea- 
tion must include everything in creation that has 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE, 207 

sentient life. That I should in the class include a 
greater number of phenomena than a reader may- 
be prepared to admit, will nowise affect the force 
of what I have to say, seeing my point is simply 
this : that in the term creation Paul comprises all 
creatures capable of suffering; the condition of 
which sentient, therefore superior portion, gives 
him occasion to speak of the whole creation as 
suffering in the process of its divine evolution or 
development, groaning and travailing as in the 
pangs of giving birth to a better self, a nobler 
world. It is not necessary to the idea that the 
creation should know what it is groaning after, or 
wherein the higher condition constituting its de- 
liverance must consist. The human race groans 
for deliverance : how much does the race know 
that its redemption Hes in becoming one with the 
Father, and partaking of his glory? Here and 
there one of the race knows it — which is indeed a 
pledge for the race — but the race cannot be said to 
know its own lack, or to have even a far-off notion 
of what alone can stay its groaning. In like man- 
ner the whole creation is groaning after an unfore- 
seen yet essential birth — groans with the necessity 
of being freed from a state that is but a transitional 



208 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

and not a true one, from a condition that nowise 
answers to the intent in which existence began. 
In both the lower creation and the higher, this 
same groaning of the fettered idea after a freer life 
seems the first enforced decree of a holy fate, and 
itself the first movement of the hampered thing 
toward the liberty of another birth. 

To believe that God made many of the lower 
creatures merely for prey, or to be the slaves of a 
slave, and writhe under the tyrannies of a cruel 
master who will not serve his own master; that 
he created and is creating an endless succession of 
them to reap little or no good of life but its cessa- 
tion — a doctrine held by some, and practically ac- 
cepted by multitudes — is to believe in a God who, 
so far as one portion at least of his creation is con- 
cerned, is a demon. But a creative demon is an 
absurdity; and were such a creator possible, he 
would not be God, but must one day be found and 
destroyed by the real God. Not the less the fact 
remains, that miserable suffering abounds among 
them, and that, even supposing God did not fore- 
see how creation would turn out for them, the 
thing lies at his door. He has besides made them 
so far dumb that they cannot move the hearts of 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 209 

the oppressors into whose hands he has given them, 

teUing how hard they find the world, how sore 

their hfe in it. The apostle takes up their case, 

and gives us material for an answer to such as 

blame God for their sad condition. 

There are many, I suspect, who from the eighth 

chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans gather 

this much and no more : that the lower animals 

aHve at the coming of the Lord, whensoever that 

may be, will thenceforward, with such as thereafter 

may come into existence, lead a happy life for the 

time allotted them! Strong champions of God, 

these profound believers! What lovers of life, 

what disciples of St. Paul, nay, what disciples of 

Jesus, to whom such a gloss is consolation for the 

moans of the universe! Truly, the furnace of 

affliction they would extinguish thus casts out the 

more an evil odor! For all the creatures who 

through ages of misery have groaned and travailed 

and died, to these mild Christians it is enough that 

they are dead, therefore, as they would argue, out 

of it now! ^' It is well with them," I seem to hear 

such say ; " they are mercifully dealt with ; their 

sufferings are over ; they had not to live on forever 

in oppression. The God of their life has taken 
14 



2IO THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

from them their past, and troubles them with no 
future ! It is true this were no small consolation 
concerning such as are gone away ! Surely rest is 
better than ceaseless toil and pain ! But what shall 
we say of such a heedless God as those Christians 
are content to worship! Is he a merciful God? 
Is he a loving God? How shall he die to escape 
the remorse of the authorship of so much misery? 
Our pity turns from the dead creature to the live 
creator who could live and know himself the maker 
of so many extinguished hearts, whose friend was 
— not he, but Death. Blessed be the name of the 
Father of Jesus, there is no such creator ! 

But we have not to do with the dead only; 
there are those which live and suffer : is there no 
comfort concerning them, but that they too shall 
at length die and leave their misery ? And what 
shall we say of those coming, and yet to come and 
pass — evermore issuing from the fountain of life, 
daily bom into evil things? Will the consolation 
that they will soon die suffice for the heart of the 
child who laments over his dead bird or rabbit, and 
would fain love that Father in heaven who keeps 
on making the creatures ? Alas, they are crowding 
in; they cannot help themselves; their misery is 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 211 

awaiting them ! Would those Christians have me 
believe in a God who differentiates creatures from 
himself, only that they may be the prey of other 
creatures, or spend a few hours or years, helpless 
and lonely, speechless and without appeal, in mer- 
ciless hands, then pass away into nothingness? I 
will not ; in the name of Jesus, I will not. Had he 
not known something better, would he have said 
what he did about the Father of men and the 
sparrows ? 

What many men call their beliefs are but the 
prejudices they happen to have picked up : why 
should such believers waste a thought as to how 
their paltry fellow- inhabitants of the planet fare? 
Many, indeed, have all their lives been too busy 
making their human fellows groan and sweat for 
their own fancied well-being, to spare a thought 
for the fate of the yet more helpless. But there 
are not a few who would be indignant at having 
their belief in God questioned, who yet seem 
greatly to fear imagining him better than he is : 
whether is it he or themselves they dread injuring 
by expecting too much of him? ''You see the 
plain facts of the case!" they say. ''There is no 
questioning them! What can be done for the 



212 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

poor things — except, indeed, you take the absurd 
notion into your head, that they too have a life be- 
yond the grave?" 

Why should such a notion seem to you absurd ? 
I answer. ' The teachers of the nation have unwit- 
tingly, it seems to me through unbelief, wronged 
the animals deeply by their silence anent the 
thoughtless popular presumption that they have 
no hereafter; thus leaving them deprived of a 
great advantage to their position among men. But 
I suppose they too have taken it for granted that 
the Preserver of man and beast never had a thought 
of keeping one beast alive beyond a certain time ; 
in which case heartless men might well argue he 
did not care how they wronged them, for he meant 
them no redress. Their immortality is no new 
faith with me, but as old as my childhood. 

Do you beheve in immortality for yourself? I 
would ask any reader who is not in sympathy with 
my hope for the animals. If not, I have no argu- 
ment with you. But if you do, why not believe 
in it for them ? Verily, were immortality no greater 
a thing for the animals than it seems for men to 
some who yet profess to expect it, I should scarce 
care to insist upon their share in it. But if the 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 213 

thought be anywise precious to you, is it essential 
to your enjoyment in it, that nothing less than 
yourself should share its realization ? Are you the 
lowest kind of creature that could be permitted 
to live? Had God been of like heart with you, 
would he have given life and immortality to creat- 
ures so much less than himself as we ? Are these 
not worth making immortal? How, then, were 
they worth calling out of the depth of no-being? 
It is a greater deed, to make be that which was 
not, than to seal it with an infinite immortality : 
did God do that which was not worth doing? 
What he thought worth making, you think not 
worth continuing made ! You would have him go 
on forever creating new things with one hand, and 
annihilating those he had made with the other — 
for I presume you would not prefer the earth to 
be without animals! If it were harder for God to 
make the former go on living than to send forth 
new, then his creatures were no better than the 
toys which a child makes, and destroys as he 
makes them. For what good, for what divine 
purpose is the Maker of the sparrow present at its 
death, if he does not care what becomes of it? 
What is he there for, I repeat, if he have no care 



214 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

that it go well with his bird in its dying, that it be 
neither comfortless nor lost in the abyss ? If his 
presence be no good to the sparrow, are you very 
sure what good it will be to you when your hour 
comes ? Believe it is not by a little only that the 
heart of the universe is tenderer, more loving, more 
just and fair, than yours or mine. 

If you did not believe you were yourself to out- 
live, death, I could not blame you for thinking all 
was over with the sparrow ; but to believe in im- 
mortality for yourself, and not care to believe in it 
for the sparrow, would be simply hard-hearted and 
selfish. If it would make you happy to think there 
was life beyond death for the sparrow as well as 
for yourself, I would gladly help you at least to 
hope that there may be. 

I know of no reason why I should not look for 
the animals to rise again, in the same sense in 
which I hope myself to rise again — which is, to 
reappear, clothed with another and better form of 
life than before. If the Father will raise his chil- 
dren, why should he not also raise those whom he 
has taught his little ones to love? Love is the 
one bond of the universe, the heart of God, the 
life of his children : if animals can be loved, they 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 215 

are lovable ; if they can love, they are yet more 
plainly lovable : love is eternal ; how then should 
its object perish? Must the very immortality of 
love divide the bond of love? Must the love live 
on forever without its object? or, worse still, must 
the love die with its object, and be eternal no more 
than it ? What a mis-invented correlation in which 
the one side was eternal, the other, where not yet 
annihilated, constantly perishing ! Is not our love 
to the animals a precious variety of love ? And if 
God gave the creatures to us, that a new phase of 
love might be born in us toward another kind of 
life from the same fountain, why should the new 
life be more perishing than the new love? Can 
you imagine that, if, hereafter, one of God's little 
ones were to ask him to give again one of the 
earth's old loves — kitten, or pony, or squirrel, or 
dog, which he had taken from him, the Father 
would say no ? If the thing was so good that God 
made it for and gave it to the child at first who 
never asked for it, why should he not give it again 
to the child who prays for it because the Father 
had made him love it ? What a child may ask for, 
the Father will keep ready. 

That there are difficulties in the way of believ- 



2l6 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

ing thus, I grant; that there are impossibilities, I 
deny. Perhaps the first difficulty that occurs is, 
the many forms of life which we cannot desire 
again to see. But while we would gladly keep the 
perfected forms of the higher animals, we m^ay 
hope that those of many other kinds are as transi- 
tory as their bodies, belonging but to a stage of 
development. All animal forms tend to higher: 
why should not the individual, as well as the race, 
pass through stages of ascent? If I have myself 
gone through each of the typical forms of lower life 
on my way to the human — a supposition by ante- 
natal history rendered probable — and therefore 
may have passed through any number of individual 
forms of hfe, I do not see why each of the lower 
animals should not as well pass upward through a 
succession of bettering embodiments. I grant that 
the theory requires another to complement it; 
namely, that those men and women who do not 
even approximately fulfill the conditions of their 
elevated rank, who will not endeavor after the 
great human- divine idea, striving to ascend, are 
sent away back down to that stage of develop- 
ment, say of fish or insect or reptile, beyond which 
their moral nature has refused to advance. Who 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 21 7 

has not seen or known men who appeared not to 
have passed, or indeed in some things to have ap- 
proached, the development of the more human of 
the lower animals ! Let those take care who look 
contemptuously upon the animals, lest, in misusing 
one of them, they misuse some ancestor of their 
own, sent back, as the one mercy for him, to reas- 
sume far past forms and conditions — far past in 
physical, that is, but not in moral development — 
and so have another opportunity of passing the 
self- constituted barrier. The suggestion may ap- 
pear very ridiculous, and no doubt lends itself to 
humorous comment ; but what if it should be true ! 
what if the amused reader should himself be get- 
ting ready to follow the remanded ancestor ! Upon 
it, however, I do not care to spend thought or 
time, least of all argument ; what I care to press is 
the question — If we believe in the progress of crea- 
tion as hitherto manifested, also in the marvelous 
changes of form that take place in every individual 
of certain classes, why should there be any diffi- 
culty in hoping that old lives may reappear in new 
forms ? The typal soul reappears in higher formal 
type; why may not also the individual soul reap- 
pear in higher form ? 



2l8 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

Multitudes evidently count it safest to hold by a 
dull scheme of things : can it be because, like David 
in Browning's poem Saul, they dread lest they 
should worst the Giver by inventing better gifts 
than his ? That we do not know is the best rea- 
son for hoping to the full extent God has made 
possible to us. If then we go wrong, it will be in 
the direction of the right, and with such aberration 
as will be easier to correct than what must come 
of refusing to imagine, and leaving the dullest tra- 
ditional prepossessions to rule our hearts and minds, 
with no claim but the poverty of their expectation 
from the paternal riches. Those that hope little 
cannot grow much. To them the very glory of 
God must be a small thing, for their hope of it is 
so small as not to be worth rejoicing in. That he 
is a faithful creator means nothing to them for far 
the larger portion of the creatures he has made! 
Truly their notion of faithfulness is poor enough ; 
how, then, can their faith be strong! In the very 
nature of divine things, the commonplace must be 
false. The stupid, self-satisfied soul, which can- 
not know its own stupidity, and will not trouble 
itself either to understand or to imagine, is the 
farthest behind of all the backward children in 
God's nursery. 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 219 

As I say, then, I know no cause of reasonable 
difficulty in regard to the continued existence of 
the lower animals, except the present nature of 
some of them. But what Christian will dare to 
say that God does not care about them? — and he 
knows them as we cannot know them. Great or 
small, they are his. Great are all his results ; small 
are all his beginnings. That we have to send 
many of his creatures out of this phase of their life 
because of their hurtfulness in this phase of ours, 
is to me no stumbling-block. The very fact that 
this has always had to be done, the long-protracted 
combat of the race with such, and the constantly 
repeated though not invariable victory of the man, 
has had an essential and incalculable share in the 
development of humanity, which is the rendering 
of man capable of knowing God ; and when their 
part to that end is no longer necessary, changed 
conditions may speedily so operate that the wolf 
shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard lie down 
with the kid. The difficulty may go for nothing in 
view of the forces of that future with which this 
loving speculation concerns itself. 

I would now lead my companion a little closer 
to what the apostle says in the "nineteenth verse ; 
to come closer, if we may, to the idea that burned 



220 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

in his heart when he wrote what we call the eighth 
chapter of his epistle to the Romans. Oh, how far 
ahead he seems, in his hope for the creation, of 
the footsore and halting brigade of Christians at 
present crossing the world ! He knew Christ, and 
could therefore look into the will of the Father. 

''For the earnest expectation of the creature wait- 
eth for the manifestation of the sons of God'' 

At the head of one of his poems, Henry Vaughan 
has this Latin translation of the verse: I do not 
know whether he found or made it, but it is closer 
to its sense than ours : — 

" Etenim res creatae exerto capite observantes 
expectant revelationem iiliorum Dei." — "For the 
things created, watching with head thrust out, 
await the revelation of the sons of God." 

Why? 

Because God has subjected the creation to 
vanity, in the hope that the creation itself shall be 
delivered from the bondage of corruption into the 
glorious liberty of the children of God. For this 
double deliverance — from corruption and the con- 
sequent subjection to vanity, the creation is eagerly 
watching. 

The bondage of corruption God encounters and 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 221 

counteracts by subjection to vanity. Corruption is 
the breaking up of the essential idea; the falling 
away from the original indwelling and life- causing 
thought. It is met by the suffering which itself 
causes. That suffering is for redemption, for deliv- 
erance. It is the life in the corrupting thing that 
makes the suffering possible ; it is the live part, not 
the corrupted part, that suffers ; it is the redeem- 
able, not the doomed thing, that is subjected to 
vanity. The race in which evil — that is, corruption, 
is at work, needs, as the one means for its rescue, 
subjection to vanity ; it is the one hope against the 
supremacy of corruption ; and the whole encircling, 
harboring, and helping creation must, for the sake 
of man, its head, and for its own further sake too, 
share in this subjection to vanity with its hope of 
deliverance. 

Corruption brings in vanity, causes empty ach- 
ing gaps in vitality. This aching is what most 
people regard as evil : it is the unpleasant cure of 
evil. It takes all shapes of suffering — of the body, 
of the mind, of the heart, of the spirit. It is 
altogether beneficent : without this ever invading 
vanity, what hope would there be for the rich and 
powerful, accustomed to and set upon their own 



222 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

way? what hope for the self-indulgent, the con- 
ceited, the greedy, the miserly ? The more things 
men seek, the more varied the things they imagine 
they need, the more are they subject to vanity — 
all the forms of which may be summed in the 
word disappointment. He who would not house 
with disappointment must seek the incorruptible, 
the true. He must break the bondage of havings 
and shows ; of rumors, and praises, and pretenses, 
and selfish pleasures. He must come out of the 
false into the real; out of the darkness into the 
light; out of the bondage of corruption into the 
glorious liberty of the children of God. To bring 
men to break with corruption, the gulf of the inane 
yawns before them. Aghast in soul, they cry, 
"Vanity of vanities! all is vanity!" and beyond 
the abyss begin to espy the eternal world of truth. 
Note now " the hope that the creation itself 
also," as something besides and other than God's 
men and women, '* shall be delivered from the 
bondage of corruption, into the liberty of the glory 
of the children of God." The creation then is to 
share in the deliverance and liberty and glory of the 
children of God. Deliverance from corruption, 
liberty from bondage, must include escape from the 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 223 

very home and goal of corruption, namely death, — 
and that in all its kinds and degrees. When you say 
then that for the children of God there is no more 
death, remember that the deliverance of the creat- 
ure is from the bondage of corruption into the 
glorious liberty of the children of God. Dead, in 
bondage to corruption, how can they share in the 
liberty of the children of Life? Where is their 
deliverance ? 

If such then be the words of the apostle, does 
he, or does he not, I ask, hold the idea of the im- 
mortality of the animals ? If you say all he means 
is, that the creatures alive at the coming of the 
Lord will be set free from the tyranny of corrupt 
man, I refer you to what I have already said of 
the poverty of such an interpretation, accepting 
the failure of justice and love toward those that 
have passed away, are passing, and must yet, ere 
that coming, be born to pass away forever. For 
the man whose heart aches to adore a faithful cre- 
ator, what comfort lies in such good news! He 
must perish for lack of a true God ! Oh lame con- 
clusion to the grand prophecy ! Is God a mocker, 
who will not be mocked ? Is there a past to God 
with which he has done ? Is Time too much for 



224 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

him? Is he God enough to care for those that 
happen to Hve at one present time, but not God 
enough to care for those that happen to Hve at an- 
other present time ? Or did he care for them, but 
could not help them ? Shall we not rather believe 
that the vessels of less honor, the misused, the 
maltreated, shall be filled full with creative wine at 
last? Shall not the children have little dogs un- 
der the Father's table, to which to let fall plenty of 
crumbs ? If there was such provision for the spar- 
rows of our Lord's time of sojourn, and he will 
bring yet better with him when he comes again, 
how should the dead sparrows and their sorrows be 
passed over of him with whom is no variableness, 
neither shadow of turning? Or would the deliver- 
ance of the creatures into the groaned-for liberty 
have been much worth mentioning, if within a few 
years their share in the glory of the sons of God 
was to die away in death? But the gifts of God 
are without repentance. 

How St. Paul longs for and loves liberty ! Only 
true lover of liberty is he, who will die to give it 
to his neighbor! St. Paul loved liberty more than 
his own liberty. But then see how different his 
notion of the liberty on its way to the children of 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE, 22$ 

God, from the dull modern fancies of heaven still 
set forth in the popular hymn-books! The new- 
heaven and the new earth will at least be a heaven 
and an earth! What would the newest earth be 
to the old children without its animals? Barer 
than the heavens emptied of the constellations that 
are called by their names. Then, if the earth must 
have its animals, why not the old ones, already 
dear ? The sons of God are not a new race of sons 
of God, but the old race glorified: — why a new 
race of animals, and not the old ones glorified ? 

The apostle says they are to share in the liberty 
of the sons of God : will it not then be a liberty 
like ours, a liberty always ready to be offered on 
the altar of love? What sweet service will not 
that of the animals be, thus offered ! How sweet 
also to minister to them in their turns of need! 
For to us doubtless will they then flee for help in 
any difficulty, as now they flee from us in dread of 
our tyranny. What lovelier feature in the new- 
ness of the new earth, than the old animals glori- 
fied with us, in their home with us — our common 
home, the house of our Father — each kind an un- 
failing pleasure to the other! Ah, what horses! 

Ah, what dogs! Ah, what wild beasts, and what 
15 



226 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

birds in the air! The whole redeemed creation 
goes to make up St. Paul's heaven. He had 
learned of him who would leave no one out ; who 
made the excuse for his murderers that they did 
not know what they were doing. 

Is not the prophecy on the groaning creation to 
have its fulfillment in the new heavens and the new 
earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness? Does not 
this involve its existence beyond what we call this 
world? Why should it not then involve immor- 
tality ? Would it not be more like the king eter- 
nal, immortal, invisible, to know no life but the im- 
mortal ? to create nothing that could die ? to slay 
nothing but evil ? " For he is not a God of the 
dead, but of the living ; for all live unto him." 

But what is this liberty of the children of God, 
for which the whole creation is waiting ? The chil- 
dren themselves are waiting for it : when they have 
it, then will their house and retinue, the creation, 
whose fate hangs on that of the children, share it 
with them : what is this liberty ? 

All liberty must of course consist in the realiza- 
tion of the ideal harmony between the creative 
will and the created life ; in the correspondence of 
the creature's active being to the creator's idea, 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE, 22/ 

which is his substantial soul. In other words, the 
creature's liberty is what his obedience to the law 
of his existence, the will of his maker, effects for 
him. The instant a soul moves counter to the 
will of its prime cause, the universe is its prison ; 
it dashes against the walls of it, and the sweetest 
of its uplifting and sustaining forces at once be- 
come its manacles and fetters. But St. Paul is not 
at the moment thinking either of the metaphysical 
notion of liberty, or of its religious realization ; he 
has in his thought the birth of the soul's conscious- 
ness of freedom. 

" And not only so " — ^that the creation groaneth 
and travaileth — " but ourselves also, which have 
the first-fruits of the spirit, even we ourselves 
groan within ourselves, waiting for . . . the re- 
demption of our body." — -We are not free, he im- 
plies, until our body is redeemed ; then all the 
creation will be free with us. He regards the crea- 
tion as part of our embodiment. The whole crea- 
tion is waiting for the manifestation of the sons of 
God — that is, the redemption of their body, the 
idea of which extends to their whole material en- 
velopment, with ail the life that belongs to it For 
this as for them, the bonds of corruption must fall 



228 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

away; it must enter into the same liberty with 
them, and be that for which it was created — a vital 
temple, perfected by the unbroken indwelling of its 
divinity. 

The liberty here intended, it may be unneces- 
sary to say, is not that essential liberty — -freedom 
from sin, but the completing of the redemption of 
the spirit by the redemption of the body, the per- 
fecting of the greater by its necessary complement 
of the less. Evil has been constantly at work, 
turning our house of the body into a prison ; ren- 
dering it more opaque and heavy and insensible ; 
casting about it bands and cerements, and filling it 
with aches and pains. The freest soul, the purest 
of lovers, the man most incapable of anything 
mean, would not, for all his mighty liberty, yet 
feel absolutely at large while chained to a dying 
body — nor the less hampered, but the more, that 
that dying body was his own. The redemption of 
the body, therefore, the making of it for the man 
a genuine, perfected, responsive house-alive, is es- 
sential to the apostle's notion of a man's deliver- 
ance. The new man must have a new body with 
a new heaven and earth. St. Paul never thinks of 
himself as released from body ; he desires a per- 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE, 229 

feet one, and of a nobler sort ; he would inhabit a 
heaven-made house, and give up the earth-made 
one, suitable only to this lower stage of life, in- 
fected and unsafe from the first, and now much 
dilapidated in the service of the Master who could 
so easily give him a better. He wants a spiritual 
body — a body that will not thwart but second the 
needs and aspirations of the spirit. He had in his 
mind, I presume, such a body as the Lord died 
with, changed by the interpenetrating of the crea- 
tive indwelling will, to a heavenly body, the body 
with which he rose. A body like the Lord's is, I 
imagine, necessary to bring us into true and per- 
fect contact with the creation, of which there must 
be multitudinous phases whereof we cannot now 
be even aware. 

The way in which both good and indifferent 
people alike lay the blame on their bodies, and 
look to death rather than God-aided struggle to 
set them at liberty, appears to me low and cow- 
ardly : it is the master fleeing from the slave, de- 
spising at once and fearing him. We must hold the 
supremacy over our bodies, but we must not de- 
spise body ; it is a divine thing. Body and soul 
are in the image of God ; and the Lord of life was 



230 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

last seen in the glorified body of his death. I be- 
lieve that he still wears that body. But we shall 
do better without these bodies that suffer and grow 
old — which may indeed, as some think, be but the 
outer cases, the husks of our real bodies. End- 
lessly helpful as they have been to us, and that, in 
a measure, incalculable, through their very sub- 
jection to vanity, we are yet surely not in alto- 
gether and only helpful company, so long as the 
houses wherein we live have so many spots and 
stains in them which friendly death, it may be, can 
alone wash out — so many weather- eaten and self- 
engendered sores which the builder's hand, pulling 
down and rebuilding of fresh and nobler material, 
alone can banish. 

When the sons, then, are free, when their bodies 
are redeemed, they will lift up with them the lower 
creation into their liberty. St. Paul seems to be- 
lieve that perfection in their kind awaits also the 
humbler inhabitants of our world, its advent to fol- 
low immediately on the manifestation of the sons 
of God : for our sakes and their own they have 
been made subject to vanity ; for our sakes and 
their own they shall be restored and glorified, that 
is, raised higher with us. 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 23 1 

Has the question no interest for you ? It would 
have much, had you now what you must one day 
have — a heart big enough to love any life God has 
thought fit to create. Had the Lord cared no 
more for what of his Father's was lower than him- 
self, than you do for what of your Father's is lower 
than you, you would not now be looking for any 
sort of redemption. 

I have omitted in my quotations the word adop- 
tion used in both English versions : it is no trans- 
lation of the Greek word for which it stands. It is 
used by St. Paul as meaning the same thing with 
the phrase, " the redemption of the body " — a fact 
to bring the interpretation given it at once into 
question. Falser translation, if we look at the im- 
portance of the thing signified, and its utter loss in 
the word used to represent it, not to mention the 
substitution for that of the apostle of an idea not 
only untrue but actively mischievous, was never 
made. The thing St. Paul means in the word he 
uses has simply nothing to do with adoption — 
nothing whatever. In the beginning of the fourth 
chapter of his epistle to the Galatians, he makes 
perfectly clear what he intends by it. His unusual 
word means the father's recognition, when he 



232 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

comes of age, of the child's relation to him, by- 
giving him his fitting place of dignity in the house ; 
and here the deliverance of the body is the act of 
this recognition by the great Father, completing 
and crowning and declaring the freedom of the 
man, the perfecting of the last lingering remnant 
of his deliverance. St. Paul's word, I repeat, has 
nothing to do with adoption; it means the mani- 
lestation of the grown-up sons of God ; the show- 
ing of those as sons, who have always been his 
children ; the bringing of them out before the uni- 
verse in such suitable attire and with such fit at- 
tendance, that to look at them is to see what they 
are, the sons of the house — such to whom their 
Elder Brother applied the words : " I said ye are 
gods.'* 

If then the sons groan within themselves, look- 
ing to be lifted up, and the other inhabitants of the 
same world groan with them and cry, shall they 
not also be lifted up ? Have they not also a faith- 
ful creator ? He must be a selfish man indeed who 
does not desire that it should be so. 

It appears then, that, in the expectation of the 
apostle, the new heavens and the new earth in 
which dwell the sons of God are to be inhabited 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE, 233 

by blessed animals also — inferior, but risen — and, 
I think, yet to rise in continuous development. 

Here let me revert a moment, and say a little 
more clearly and strongly a thing I have already 
said: 

When the apostle speaks of the whole creation, 
is it possible he should have dismissed the animals 
from his thoughts, to regard the trees and flowers 
bearing their part in the groaning and travailing of 
the sore burdened world? Or could he, animals 
and trees and flowers forgotten, have intended by 
the creation that groaned and travailed only the 
bulk of the earth, its mountains and valleys, plains 
and seas and rivers, its aglomeration of hard and 
soft, of hot and cold, of moist and dry? If he 
could, then the portion that least can be supposed 
to feel or know is regarded by the apostle of love 
as immeasurably more important than the portion 
that loves and moans and cries. Nor is this all ; 
for thereupon he attributes the suffering faculty of 
the excluded, far more sentient portion at least, to 
the altogether inferior and less sentient, and upon 
the ground of that faculty builds the vision of its 
redemption ! If it could be so, then how should 
the seeming apostle's affected rhapsody of hope be 



234 ^^^ HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

to US other than a mere puff-ball of falsest rhetoric, 
a special-pleading for nothing, as degrading to art 
as objectless in nature? 

Much would I like to know clearly what animals 
the apostle saw on his travels, or around his home 
when he had one — their conditions, and their rela- 
tions to their superiors. Anyhow, they were often 
suffering creatures ; and Paul was a man growing 
hourly in likeness to his Maker and theirs, there- 
fore overflowing with sympathy. Perhaps as he 
wrote, there passed through his mind a throb of 
pity for the beasts he had to kill at Ephesus. 

If the Lord said very little about animals, could 
he have done more for them than tell men that his 
Father cared for them ? He has thereby wakened 
and is wakening in the hearts of men' a seed his 
Father planted. It grows but slowly, yet has 
already borne a little precious fruit. His loving 
friend St. Francis has helped him, and many others 
have tried, and are now trying to help him : who- 
ever sows the seed of that seed the Father planted 
is helping the Son. Our behavior to the animals, 
our words concerning them, are seed, either good 
or bad, in the hearts of our children. No one can 
tell to what the animals might not grow, even here 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 235 

on the old earth under the old heaven, if they were 
but dealt with according to their true position in 
regard to us. They are, in sense very real and di- 
vine, our kindred. If I call them our poor rela- 
tions, it is to suggest that poor relations are often 
ill used. Relatives, poor or rich, may be such ill- 
behaved, self-assertive, disagreeable persons, that 
we cannot treat them as we gladly would ; but our 
endeavor should be to develop every true relation. 
He who is prejudiced against a relative because he 
is poor, is himself an ill-bred relative, and to be 
ill-bred is an excluding fault with the court of the 
high countries. There, poverty is welcome, vul- 
garity inadmissible. 

Those who love certain animals selfishly, pam- 
pering them, as so many mothers do their children 
with worse results, that they may be loved of them 
in return, betray them to their enemies. They are 
not lovers of animals, but only of favorites, and do 
their part to make the rest of the world dislike ani- 
mals. Theirs are the dogs that inhospitably growl 
and bark and snap, moving the indifferent to dis- 
like, and confirming the unfriendly in their antag- 
onism. Any dog-parliament, met in the interests 
of their kind, would condemn such dogs to be dis- 



236 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

erectly bitten, and their mistresses to be avoided. 
And certainly, if animals are intended to live and 
grow, she is the enemy of any individual animal 
who stunts his moral and intellectual development 
by unwise indulgence. Of whatever nature be the 
heaven of the animals, that animal is not in the fair 
way to enter it. The education of the lower lies 
at the door of the higher, and in true education is 
truest kindness. 

But what shall I say of such as for any kind of 
end subject animals to torture? I dare hardly 
trust myself to the expression of my judgment of 
their conduct in this regard. 

" We are investigators ; we are not doing it for 
our own sakes, but for the sake of others, our fel- 
low-men." 

The higher your motive for it, the greater is the 
blame of your unrighteousness. Must we con- 
gratulate you on such a love for your fellows as 
inspires you to wrong the weaker than they, those 
that are without helper against you? Shall we 
count the man worthy who, for the sake of his 
friend, robbed another man too feeble to protect 
himself, and too poor to punish his assailant ? For 
the sake of your children, would you waylay a 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE, 237 

beggar? No real good can grow in the soil of 
injustice. 

I cannot help suspecting, however, that the de- 
sire to know has a greater share in the enormity 
than the desire to help. Alas for the science that 
will sacrifice the law of righteousness but to behold 
a law of sequence! The tree of knowledge will 
never prove to man the tree of life. There is no 
law says, Thou shalt know ; a thousand laws cry 
out, Thou shalt do right. These men are a law 
unto themselves — and what a law ! It is the old 
story : the greed of knowing casts out righteous- 
ness, and mercy, and faith. Whatever believed a 
benefit may or may not thus be wrought for higher 
creatures, the injustice to the lower is nowise af- 
fected. Justice has no respect of persons, but they 
are surely the weaker that stand more in need of 
justice ! 

Labor is a law of the universe, and is not an 
evil. Death is a law of this world at least, and is 
not an evil. Torture is the law of no world, but 
the hell of human invention. Labor and death are 
for the best good of those that labor and die ; they 
are laws of life. Torture is doubtless overruled for 
the good of the tortured, but it will one day burn 
a very hell in the hearts of the torturers. 



238 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL. 

Torture can be inflicted only by the superior. 
The divine idea of a superior is one who requires 
duty, and protects, helps, delivers : our relation to 
the animals is that of their superiors in the family, 
who require labor, it may be, but are just, helpful, 
protective. Can they know anything of the Father 
who neither love nor rule their inferiors, but use 
them as a child his insensate toys, pulling them to 
pieces to know what is inside them? Such men, 
so-called of science — let them have the dignity to 
the fullness of its worth — lust to know as if a man's 
life lay in knowing, as if it were a vile thing to be 
ignorant — so vile that, for the sake of his secret 
hoard of facts, they do right in breaking with tort- 
ure into the house of the innocent! Surely they 
shall not thus find the way of understanding! 
Surely there is a maniac thirst for knowledge, as 
a maniac thirst for wine or for blood! He who 
loves knowledge the most genuinely, will with the 
most patience wait for it until it can be had right- 
eously. 

Need I argue the injustice? Can a sentient 
creature come forth without rights, without claim 
to well-being, or to consideration from the other 
creatures whom they find, equally without action 
of their own, present in space? If one answer, 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 239 

" For aught I know, it may be so," — Where, then, 
are thy own rights ? I ask. If another have none, 
thine must He in thy superior power; and will 
there not one day come a stronger than thou? 
May est thou not one day be in Naboth's place, 
with an Ahab getting up to go into thy vineyard 
to possess it? The rich man may come prowling 
after thy little ewe lamb, and what wilt thou have 
to say? He may be the stronger, and thou the 
weaker! That the rights of the animals are so 
much less than ours does not surely argue them 
the less rights! They have little, and we have 
mxuch ; ought they therefore to have less and we 
more ? Must we not rather be the more honorably 
anxious that they have their little to the full? 
Every gain of injustice is a loss to the world ; for 
hfe consists neither in length of days nor in ease of 
body. Greed of life and wrong done to secure it, 
will never work anything but direct loss. As to 
knowledge, let justice guide thy search and thou 
wilt know the sooner. Do the will of God, and 
thou shalt know God, and he will open thine eyes 
to look into the very heart of knowledge. Force 
thy violent way, and gain knowledge, to miss truth. 
Thou mayest wound the heart of God, but thou 



240 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

canst not rend it asunder to find the Truth that sits 
there enthroned. 

What man would he be who accepted the offer 
to be healed and kept alive by means which ne- 
cessitated the torture of certain animals ? Would 
he feel himself a gentleman — walking the earth 
with the sense that his life and conscious well-being 
were informed and upheld by the agonies of other 
lives ? 

'' I hope, sir, your health is better than it has 
been?" 

" Thank you, I am wonderfully restored — have 
entered in truth upon a fresh lease of hfe. My 
organism has been nourished with the agonies of 
several dogs, and the pangs of a multitude of rab- 
bits and guinea-pigs, and I am^ aware of a marvel- 
ous change for the better. They gave me their 
lives, and I gave them in return worse pains than 
mine. The bargain has proved a quite satisfactory 
one ! True, their lives were theirs, not mine ; but 
then their sufferings were theirs, not mine ! They 
could not defend themselves ; they had not a word 
to say, so reasonable was the exchange. Poor 
fools! they were neither so wise, nor so strong, 
nor such lovers of comfort as I! If they could 



THE HOPE OF THE UNIVERSE. 24 1 

not take care of themselves, that was their look- 
out, not mine! Every animal for himself!" 

There was a certain patriotic priest who thought 
it better to put a just man to death than that a 
whole nation should perish. Precious salvation 
that might be wrought by injustice! But then the 
just man taught that the rich man and the beggar 
must one day change places. 

" To set the life of a dog against the life of a 
human being!" 

No, but the torture of a dog against the pro- 
longed life of a being capable of torturing him. 
Priceless gain, the lengthening of such a life, to the 
man and his friends and his country ! 

That the animals do not suffer so much as we 
should under like inflictions, I hope true, and think 
true. But is toothache nothing, because there are 
yet worse pains for head and face ? 

Not a few who now regard themselves as bene- 
factors of mankind will one day be looked upon 
with a disapprobation which no argument will now 
convince them they deserve. But yet another 
day is coming, when they will themselves right sor- 
rowfully pour out disapprobation upon their own 

deeds ; for they are not stones but men, and must 
16 



242 THE HOPE OF THE GOSPEL, 

repent. Let them, in the interests of humanity, 
give their own entrails to the knife, their own silver 
cord to be laid bare, their own golden bowl to be 
watched throbbing, and I will worship at their feet. 
But shall I admire their discoveries at the expense 
of the stranger — nay, no stranger — the poor brother 
within their gates? 

Your conscience does not trouble you? Take 
heed that the light that is in you be not darkness. 
Whatever judgment mean, will it suffice you in 
that hour to say, " My burning desire to know how 
life wrought in him drove me through the gates 
and bars of his living house " ? I doubt if you 
will add, in your heart, any more than with your 
tongue, *' and I did well." 

To those who expect a world to come, I say, 
then. Let us take heed how we carry ourselves 
to the creation which is to occupy with us the 
world to come. 

To those whose hearts are sore for that creation, 
I say. The Lord is mindful of his own, and will 
save both man and beast. 

THE END. 



D. APPLETON & 00/S PUBLICATIONS. 



RELIGIOUS WORKS. 

THE PROPHETS OF ISRAEL, AND THEIR PLACE 
IN HISTORY, to the Close of the Eighth Century b. c. By W. 
Robertson Smith, M. A., LL. D., author of " The Old Testament in 
the Jewish Church." 12mo. Cloth, $1.75. 

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